An interview with Brian Phillips, author of ‘Out in the Great Alone’

When I asked Brian Phillips, formerly of Grantland and currently of MTV News, how he pitched editors the idea for the story that became “Out in the Great Alone,” a novella-length feature on the Iditarod, I expected to hear of multiple taut conversations in which he convinced ESPN to give him the budget to begin his expedition.

As it turns out, it was surprisingly easy. After Phillips had gone to Wimbledon to cover tennis for Grantland, Bill Simmons told him to make a list of his dream travel assignments.

Over the next few years, most of those dreams became reality — including a trip to the haunting landscape of Alaska.

“I got approved to go spend thousands and thousands of dollars flying around in the wilderness when my pitch was kind of ‘yeah, I just have to go up and see it because I don’t know what I want to write yet,’” Phillips said.

The logistics, however, were more of a problem. After all, there are no roads along the path of the Iditarod.

“I kept thinking the story was going to fall through because I had no way to get north of about Willow unless I just took off on a snow machine,” Phillips said.

ESPN helped him to find a pilot who agreed to fly him around Alaska as the race was occurring, on the condition that Phillips came up early to learn how to fly the bush plane himself. He writes in the story that he started seeing the phrase “please don’t die” a little too often in work emails.

“I don’t know how this worked with ESPN’s insurance, or if we just weren’t asking those questions at that point,” Phillips said. “But finally it all just snowballed, and to my own astonishment I found myself in Alaska.”

Career Path

Phillips, who grew up in Ponca City with parents that had season tickets to Oklahoma State football and wrestling, started his career as a literary editor at The New Republic.

He moved on to being a freelance literary critic, freelancing for various poetry magazines. Frustrated with writing about other people’s writing, he started a soccer blog called Run of Play. Having begun the blog just as English Premier League soccer found an American following, Run of Play took off.

“Very few people ever connected those two parts of my career at that time. I was never hearing from people that were like, ‘hey I liked your poetry review and your soccer piece,’” Phillips said.

Soon he was writing about soccer for Slate and The New York Times Magazine. The newly-founded Grantland reached out to him to see if he would be interested in covering Wimbledon for them, which was followed by a full time job writing about basically whatever he wanted.

“At that point I was getting burnt out on soccer, so I was really happy to take that job,” Phillips said.

When Grantland folded, he followed a lot of his colleagues to MTV News.

Multimedia elements

Even if you don’t read every word of “Out in the Great Alone,” you can spend a long time playing with all the multimedia elements.

Phillips said he didn’t know exactly what the piece would look like, and what all it would incorporate, when he first went to Alaska. He just knew ESPN wanted to make it “our Snowfall,” referencing a New York Times piece that debuted in 2012.

ESPN sent a camera to Phillips, who said he had no photo experience, and told him to take as many photos as he could. The design staff would figure out the rest.

The writing process

Phillips’ story begins with a description of the “Farewell Burn” — a 35-mile stretch of the race that was burned by fire in 1977, creating a hellish landscape in the middle of an extremely arduous race.

After listing horror stories various mushers have had on that stretch, he writes, “the Burn is not the most difficult section.”

Phillips thought ESPN’s American audience would be vaguely familiar with the Iditarod, but he wanted to break them of the idea that it was simply people in parkas being pulled by dogs.

“I didn’t know if people really know if people knew what a thousand-mile race through the arctic looked like or how really grueling it was, so I wanted to kind of knock people over the head with that from the very start,” Phillips said.

Phillips didn’t start writing the story until he got back from Alaska, and then he promptly cranked out 19,000 words in 10 days.

“I wish I could do that again,” Phillips said with a laugh. “Nothing has gone that easily since then.”

He didn’t outline the story, instead just working off a gut feel of how long he thought each section to be.

“I didn’t really map it out in advance, but I had a sense of how long one sort of writing could run before I could switch to the other, and it was a matter of sort of maintaining the balance,” Phillips said. “Particularly since I was trying to do several somewhat incompatible things with that piece because it was a travel piece about my own experience, but then it was also a sports piece about the race that I was following.”

Working mainly from video recordings and notes that he scribbled down at the end of the day, Phillips emerged with a piece that is morbidly funny, full of small vignettes of interesting characters and captures the majesty and difficulty of the Iditarod.

“I didn’t really know what I was getting into at all,” Phillips said. “I didn’t have any idea when I went up there what kind of piece I would end up writing.”