How It’s Made: A 7,000-Word Story on Coal in Oakland
“This is the only time in my entire life, I think, where I wrote long and someone was like, ‘Well, could you make it longer?’”
On Feb. 5, 2026, the Oakland Review of Books (ORB) published a longform article about the James M. Gavin Power Plant — a contentious coal terminal in Oakland that was never built, on which the city might still be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The piece, written by Megan Wachspress, a former staff attorney for the Sierra Club’s Beyond Cold Campaign, clocks in at over 7,000 words and is an outstanding work of propulsive narrative synthesis. So COYOTE asked for a behind-the-scenes account of its creation.
Below, Rahawa Haile interviews Aaron Bady, a founding editor of the Oakland Review of Books (full disclosure: Rahawa and Aaron are friends), and Wachspress, a writer, professor, and attorney, to discuss how the story came together.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. We highly recommend reading Wachspress’s excellent story first.
(Seriously, it’s good.)
Rahawa Haile: It's rare to see a written feature of this length — over 7,000 words! — in 2026. I'm not a big podcast person, but I felt, reading your article, what I imagine people who love podcasts feel listening to a good investigative series. What are ORB’s goals as a new literary publication?
Aaron Bady: Let me put it this way: I think Megan's piece is one that I find very easy to point to and answer [your question with]: “that.” It’s for people who want to understand not just the basics of how something like this could happen, but to think deeply and see the bigger context. It’s a very hyper-local but hyper-ambitious ethos. ORB wants to discover what people who haven't yet had a microphone pushed in front of them will say and write.
RH: How did this piece come together?
AB: I come from Appalachia, and my mother was an anti-coal activist, or a pro-human-beings-living-on-land-where-there's-coal activist, for my entire life. Then I came to California and went to graduate school where I overlapped in time with Megan.
Megan Wachspress: Aaron emailed me [after reading about the terminal] and said, What's going on with this? Can you do an explainer? And my first response was, Uh, no? I don't know that I have anything to say?
And then I thought about it some more. And I'm like, well, I do have some things to say.
AB: I basically came to you with, I am not a lawyer. I read these articles. How in the ever-loving-fuck is this possible? Can you, who have spent a lot of time doing environmental law working on adjacent issues, explain? I needed to know the answer to these questions because it is a bonkers thing to read that Oakland might owe upwards of a billion dollars. Why isn't everybody freaking out about this?
And you started explaining it to me over preschool drop-off now and again [Ed. note: their kids go to preschool together]. And then something magical happened where you just… kind of produced the rest of the piece.
RH: How did you two determine the structure of the article? Was it written linearly, or edited non-linearly, and over what period of time?
MW: Most of the structure was there from the start. The idea of hitting those first three parts (i.e., “Who is a city for?,” “The coastal insurgency,” “Who pays?”) came together... actually this is maybe TMI, but they came together in the shower. I was just showering, and I have two kids, and that’s a time where I just get to think. I can't bring my devices in with me. I'm forced to be alone with my brain.
But then the fourth part about “reorganize or die” — that was Aaron's intervention. I originally drafted [a version that] ended with a series of rhetorical questions. And Aaron was like, You can't end a piece with rhetorical questions. You need to give them some answers.
AB: I said that because you had already talked about [the answers] at coffee! I think a lot of times, editing is really just remembering what people have said and repeating it back to them so that they can read it through.
RH: The shower is one of the most underappreciated creative spaces, I think.
MW: Yes.
RH: You were previously an attorney at the Sierra Club, and you’ll soon be teaching first-year law students about environmental and property law. Have you ever written anything like this for a public-facing audience? And how do you think about laying out this kind of in-depth historicizing of the coal terminal, of municipalities, and specifically of Oakland?
MW: I should backtrack a little and say I've been working on all of these issues for a number of years. I have been in many, many meetings about Gavin. I knew about Cheshire, Ohio because it was part of my job to try and shut that plant down. And so I don't want to take credit for doing this as a spontaneous thing or whatever. This is the product of many years of work, done in collaboration with a lot of people at the Sierra Club and on the ground in these places.
But on the public-facing journalistic writing, part of the reason why I'm no longer practicing law is because I wanted to do more of this. I've done a little writing in sort of random places. I had a piece early on, post-Oct. 7th, about how Jews were reacting to campus protests around what was, at that point, pretty clearly going to be a genocide. I've done an explainer for a lefty SCOTUS blog on a different environmental law thing.
But I wanted to do more of this writing. I wanted to have more of a literary voice, and I wanted to go deeper into the history, and to write for the general public in a way that being a practicing lawyer just doesn't give you time to do. In many ways, this piece was the culmination of both my past practice career and a career change that I embarked on about a year ago.
RH: Aaron, had you edited something like this before? From a professional in a completely different field?
AB: I've edited a lot of people writing about things I don't know about. Being a good editor is being able to assist people in their expertise, essentially just helping people write the thing that they understand better than anyone else. I’m a writer, and I write long, and I like editing people who go long. In a way, Megan gave me something long, and I said, but what if we kept going with this?
That, to me, is what makes this piece outstanding. Like, if she had written this for almost any other place, it would have had to fit into a different kind of box.
MW: This is the only time in my entire life, I think, where I wrote long and someone was like, Well, could you make it longer?
RH: Megan, you chose to start the piece with the question “Who is a city for?” I think the answer, in a very visible way in the Bay Area, is often capital: capitalist interest, capital mobility and circulation. Why was this where you chose to begin?
MW: This particular legal conflict seemed to hinge on that question. Once the city has invited capital in, does it get to regulate it to protect everyone else, or does the act of inviting it in convert the city into a tool of capital? This seemed to be an absolute crystallization of that. I sort of don't know how else to understand what it is about.
AB: I think asking that [opening] question is actually a rhetorically effective way to answer the question I came to you with, Megan, which was, How the fuck can this happen? How can a city owe a billion dollars to a company that doesn't exist?
It’s one of those things that shuts your brain down to even think about. And so opening with that question… it's kind of a fake-out, right? You’re not really asking a question. You're framing the problem to come.
RH: The article is largely about who has the power to determine debt, and how the promise of capital earnings can bind municipalities and taxpayers regardless of what unfolds. There’s a whole cast of players: Oakland (the city) and Oaklanders, OBOT (the developer) and the coal company they end up subleasing to, multiple judges disagreeing with each other in California and Kentucky. Briefly, for those who haven't yet read the article, how could Oakland residents potentially bear this kind of astronomical financial responsibility for a coal terminal that never even existed?
AB: The reason we needed Megan to tell the version of this story that she did was because you can get lost in all the facts. It is complex at a scale that a 400-word accounting that you're going to get in the SF Chronicle is never going to come close to touching. And then once you lose that sense of scale, then you're just getting a cartoon version of the story; managing that scale problem is what I think this piece does so well.
RH: This is a story rooted in Oakland, but what happened here also has global political ramifications. The final section of your feature is called “Reorganize or Die.” What does that mean to you, Megan, and how does it tie into your assertion that “carbon bankruptcy is coming, and it's only the beginning”?
MW: I came to climate work pretty late. I spent time doing labor movement stuff and criminal justice reform, and it came out of an impulse that I think a lot of people share, which is just… we can't go on like this. And confronting the fact that the way we live, the social organization of things, our relationship to resources, the destruction that has been wrought in places of energy extraction, right? It has to fall apart. “Reorganize or die” is the impulse to say, Out of that unsustainability there are many possible futures. But one starts to look something like ecofascism; it starts to look like a hardening of the borders; it starts to look like even more extreme disparities of not just wealth, but access to the fundamental life-sustaining properties of the planet. And that is not the future I want, to put it very mildly.
[In Oakland], in this targeted, discrete space, it feels like a moment and a possibility and an aperture to step back and say, Is there an exit from the logics of development and capitalism and churn that allows for a different way of thinking about the material world and our relationship to it and the way we socially organize around it? And could that just mean not redeveloping this thing in this way? Is that a starting point, a place to say no? And to what extent is our ability to do that limited by the degree that we're embedded in all of these networks, and that Oakland can't act fully autonomously from global capital in any way? The reason the piece ended with a bunch of rhetorical questions originally is because I don't have good solutions.
I spent some time while I was editing reading Malcolm Harris's What's Left, which I would recommend, and I think a lot of my despair comes from not feeling like I have a clear vision. But my impetus to keep writing and thinking and, in small ways, engaging on this comes from the impossibility of doing otherwise. Like, things are just really dire.
RH: If I may be blunt, how do you manage your despair from day to day?
MW: I am sufficiently hedonistic that I can silo some of this stuff. Sometimes it feels like the fact of my being functional is in some ways a sign of my lack of character. But everyone in Minneapolis … that's given me so much hope, you know? I mean, it's horrific. It's so dark, but also there's so much bravery.
RH: I don't think it's hedonistic to compartmentalize under fascism. I think one has to find a way to live.
MW: We do.
