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In February 2023, the rural hospital my mother worked at for over 30 years laid off 40% of its employees (including my mother) in order to stay solvent. It didn’t take and they closed six months later in October 2023 for good. This was a heartbreaking development for our family and the community and the story behind what happened to cause the closure was confusing and convoluted. Blame and suspicion abounded, everyone pointing fingers at the board, hospital admin, the community, the staff. (Not enough blame pointed at the state of Texas and its conservative policies IMO, but I digress.) I wanted to set the record straight. I also, selfishly, was working on a novel about a journalist who reports on the closure of a rural hospital but becomes more entwined in the story than she realizes. In short, reporting the story of St. Mark’s Medical Center would be an excellent exercise of research. I truly started my interviews thinking I would just do this for research, that I wouldn’t actually pitch the piece anywhere. But then I interviewed a nurse, then a board member, and then a community member, all of whom had such compelling and emotional narratives, I couldn’t look away. I was sold. But I needed to sell someone else. Enter, my pitch to Texas Monthly. The Pitch: In 2005, the small town of La Grange (pop. 4000, median household income $31,000) rallied together to fundraise $9 million to build St. Mark’s Medical Center, a much-needed, state-of-the-art trauma care hospital to serve the surrounding counties. The hospital was to be the jewel of Fayette County, a safety plan allowing the large, elderly population to age in place, an economic driver that lifted many into the middle class. Less than twenty years later, St. Mark’s has declared bankruptcy and shut their doors for the last time, leaving a $106 million economic crater into the rural county. While the loss of St. Mark’s has come to a shock to many of the area residents, this death has been a long time coming thanks to a confluence of factors hospital leadership could not have foreseen. The hospital was born and bred to be a 65-bed inpatient facility, opening its doors right as healthcare at large transitioned to an outpatient model. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid, which would have reduced St. Mark’s many uncompensated care costs, but fourteen years later, the state of Texas has yet to adopt it. And tragically, the visionary and beloved leader behind the creation of St. Mark’s, Kelly Oliphint, passed away from brain cancer shortly after the hospital opened its doors, robbing the hospital of the guiding hand it needed to navigate the rough road ahead. St. Mark’s did not go down without a fight; in 2009, the hospital avoided bankruptcy by cutting a deal with the Community Healthcare Corporation (CHC), a hospital management company that attempted to steady St. Mark’s ship. In 2014, St. Mark’s and CHC attempted to strike a buyout deal with St. David’s and HCA Healthcare, a deal that fell apart after a year of negotiations for murky reasons. In 2019, St. Mark’s attempted the Hail Mary and lobbied the city of La Grange to pass a taxing district and fund the hospital through property taxes. But confusion around the messaging of how dire St. Mark’s situation was, misinformation and small-town rumor mills, combined with a robust “no new taxes” campaign against the hospital tanked the vote 81-19. A COVID poison pill briefly saved the hospital with a gush of federal funds only to kill it soundly once those funds dried up. On October 12, 2023, after attempted resuscitation from the Board, CHC, and a new community player that once lobbied against the taxing district, St. Mark’s was taken over by HUD, where it will be auctioned off piece by piece—unless another buyer can be found. The story of St. Mark’s is the story of many rural hospitals across Texas, all failing at a rapid rate. However, while these stories tend to cover the big picture across the state, the collateral damage to their communities is missed. In this longform reported piece, I want to highlight the veteran nurses who worked 60 hour weeks to keep the hospital afloat and sell barbecue chicken on their off time in order to fundraise for hospital costs. I want to shine a light on Kelly Oliphint’s early leadership and the vision and care he put into the hospital that translated into $9 million worth of fundraising from the community. I want to share the story of how a group of individuals who originally voted no on the taxing district came together to save the hospital only to be denied at the eleventh hour. I want to capture that last night of the hospital’s operation, how the community collectively tailgated in the parking lot until the sun came up because no one wanted to leave. No one wanted to believe the end had finally come. This story will also be unique because it will be reported by me. I grew up in La Grange as a child of St. Mark’s. My mother worked as a surgical nurse for the hospital for over thirty years until she was laid off. I observed surgeries in the operating room. I babysat Kelly Oliphint’s son and attended Kelly's funeral. I walked the halls of the hospital during construction, and I drank my first glass of champagne as a seventeen year-old on the night of the hospital’s grand opening. In 2020, I sat with my mother in a patient room and watched my grandmother die of cancer. This story is personal. I have access to and have already begun interviewing doctors, Board members, hospital leadership, nurses, community members both for an against the tax district. Because of my hometown status and my status as a “hospital kid,” I am able to go deep in these conversations, cut through the logistics and into the heart of the matter. I have written Texas stories that intersect with community and politics before; this piece with Business Insider is a good example. I have published before with Texas Monthly and am a regular contributor with Texas Highways, among many other publications. See a full list of my work here. Texas Monthly is the ideal publication home for this story; it’s where I feel I’ll be able to go deep, get personal, and write this uniquely Texas story in a way that is uniquely Texan. Would Texas Monthly be interested?
Relationship with editor: I didn’t have a previous relationship with the editor, but I still can’t call this a cold pitch. I had written for Texas Monthly once before, for the Food & Drink editor who had migrated over from Texas Highways, and had become friendly with her. I knew I was traveling to Texas in order to visit a new baby cousin and figured I’d ask the Food & Drink editor to meet me in Austin for coffee. There, I pitched the bones of the story. She agreed it was compelling and promised to pass it along to the Health editor. She did, but he didn’t respond right away. Response time from editor: I sent the official pitch on March 4. The F&D editor passed it on immediately. Ten days later (March 14), I hadn’t heard anything so I nudged. I still didn’t hear anything for six more days (March 20). But by that point, the story (as it would do constantly) had changed again and had pushed itself into “timely” territory. (A buyer had thrown their hat in the ring.) This update got the editor’s attention and he responded six days later. (March 26) Overall timeline: The timeline on this got pretty hairy. It took three weeks to get a response after sending the initial pitch. March 4 - March 26. By March 27, we had agreed on word count and rate. (TBH, I wasn’t satisfied with either, but I was willing to do it because I wanted this piece to live with Texas Monthly.) I agreed to get the first draft to the editor within one month’s time, by April 26. He agreed and sent the contract. That’s where more wrinkles came in. The contract was a bit rights-grabby to say the least. And because this reporting was also serving as research for my book, I wanted to protect myself so I got my handy dandy agent on the case. She negotiated back and forth to grab some rights back. It took three of the four weeks I’d been given to write the first draft. I personally do not like to work on a piece until the ink on the contract has dried, but this was an intensive piece that couldn’t be whipped up in one week’s time. I worked on it anyway, never sure that it was going to end up publishing. But finally, one week before deadline, we came to an agreement and signed. I submitted the first draft on April 25. On May 3, the editor responded with edits. I am no journalist and that was evident in the first draft. I needed additional reporting and sourcing, as well as answers to questions he posed. I was also going on a ten-day out of country vacation in two weeks. Cue: Panic. I rewrote, re-interviewed, re-sourced. I sent in my second draft on May 15 and proceeded to ride off into the sunset for two weeks. When I returned (June 3), I waited. And waited. I started to panic that I’d really shit the bed and the editor had ghosted (even though I knew we had a contract.) But no, he responded on June 12 and said edits were forthcoming soon. Phew. Edits forthcame on June 27th with major apologies from the editor. There were still more edits needed but we were back on track and I proved to myself that I hadn’t, in fact, shit the bed like I thought I had. I had questions for his questions so we did a phone call, which was terrifying for me because I was fairly terrified of this editor, but once we got on the phone I realized once again that editors are busy humans and not monsters and he was perfectly kind and helpful. My questions answered, I got to work again. I turned in a third draft on July 15. On July 18, we learned that the buyer we thought was going to save the day had been denied and the hospital was going to auction. For christsakes, I emailed the editor, rescinded my draft and rewrote with this new update. I made my changes and sent it in July 23. On August 1 (my birthday!), the editor emailed with a few cosmetic notes and questions but with it pretty well done. We did copy edits back and forth over the week, sent pictures of the hospital for the art department to use, and it published on August 8.
Total rejections received before an acceptance: None. It was Texas Monthly or bust for me. (But when I was worried that it might not happen, I did start lining up another editor at another publication, just in case.)
Pay: .5/word at 2200 words = $1,100, minus 15% for the agent who negotiated the contract, so about $950. Which is nice, but the hometown pride is what made it worth it.
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