Mac McClelland

Early life and education

McClelland grew up in Columbus, Ohio.

In 2002, McClelland received a B.A. in English and psychology from The Ohio State University. In 2006, she received an MFA from University of New Orleans in nonfiction.

Career

From 2007 to 2013, McClelland worked at Mother Jones, where she began as an intern, working her way up from fact checker and copy editor until she was published as a writer. From 2010 to 2013 she was a Human Rights reporter, a position that was created for McClelland.

McClelland has covered both domestic and foreign stories, with international locations including Thailand, Haiti, Australia, Burma, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bhutan. McClelland worked on extensive coverage of 2010's Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

She has appeared MSNBC, PBS, NPR, Democracy Now!, the BBC, and Al Jazeera. She has been described variously as trustworthy by Newsweek, "a total bad-ass" by The American Prospect, and "a profane young bisexual" by The Wall Street Journal.

In 2010, McClelland published For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question: A Story from Burma's Never-Ending War, which was about her experience in Thailand and accounts of the refugee crisis of those fleeing nearby Burma. She had initially gone to Thailand in 2006 to teach English and spent six weeks in the country where she learned more about the Karen refugee crisis.

In July 2011, McClelland wrote an essay for GOOD about trying to treat her posttraumatic stress disorder with violent sex, PTSD which McClelland said was triggered by reporting the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and included first-hand recounting vis Twitter of being with a woman traumatized by rape. The writer Roxane Gay, a Haitian-American, was supportive of McClelland recounting her personal, first-hand experience in Haiti, Louisiana, and other locations McClelland lived and worked as a writer. Journalist Marjorie Valbrun wrote in Slate that she found the article problematic from a journalist's perspective, while writer Debra Dickerson, also writing for Slate, felt that the article was brave and fearless.

Jezebel published an "open letter to the editors" of GOOD signed by 36 female journalists and researchers, condemning McClelland's lack of understanding of the context of Haiti, saying that she was perpetuating stereotypes. Journalist Elspeth Reeve wrote in defense of McClelland's essay in The Atlantic, examining the motivations behind the Jezebel letter. Conor Friedersdorf, another journalist at The Atlantic disputed the criticism that McClelland was operating under a "colonialist mindset," instead seeing the Jezebel letter as unjustifiably scapegoating McClelland. In Essence, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat said that she met the Haitian rape victim that McClelland wrote about, and alleged that McClelland did not have permission to write about the victim. Journalist Ansel Herz blogged that he felt that McClelland had breached journalistic ethics. Journalists Amanda Taub and Jina Moore and others questioned the live-tweeting reportage method as well as the question of consent. McClelland responded via an Ms. interview, discussing the response to her personal essay.

In March 2012, McClelland's Mother Jones article on working undercover at a warehouse as a picker doing third-party logistics.

In 2015, McClelland published her second book, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story, which described her experience with posttraumatic stress disorder. The book was a further examination of her personal journey with PTSD, which was initially the subject of the essay she wrote for GOOD magazine in 2011.

In 2016, McClelland traveled to Cuba to document extreme birders for Audubon.

In 2017, McClelland wrote a feature for Rolling Stone about exploring the use of hallucinogens to treat depression and PTSD, and the underground network used by practitioners in the United States.

Since 2013, McClelland has worked as a freelance journalist.

Personal life

McClelland is married to Nico Ansel. They met in 2010 when she was reporting on the earthquake in Haiti. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Awards

Works and publications