An INFP woman’s first draft arrives as a field rather than an argument — everything in it true, nothing yet made to serve anything else. Sorting a field is a separate skill and it is learned by being made to do it. Hers was done for her, kindly, on deadline, for twenty-three years.
The housing chapter of the 2016 plan came to me at eleven at night, three days before it had to go to the printer, and it was fifty-one pages long and it was supposed to be twenty.
I took it home and cut it to nineteen and a half and sent the clean version to the policy board at six the next morning, and the board adopted the plan that autumn with two abstentions, and it is a good plan and it has held up.
I did not send it back to her. There was no time and there had not been time in 2011 either, or in 2008, and by 2016 sending it back was not a thing that occurred to me as an option, the way you do not consider whether to steer.
Anneke Dries came to the Kinnick Valley Regional Planning Commission in 2003. She was twenty-nine, a master’s in planning and three years at a county zoning office where she had been, by her own account, extremely unhappy. She is a small, quick woman who talks with her hands and interrupts herself. She reads everything. She will send you an article at ten at night with two lines about why it matters and the two lines are better than the article. She has never once in twenty-three years handed me a document that was the length I asked for, and she has never once handed me a document that did not have something in it I had not thought of.
I went out with her once, to Straun, in the summer of 2015, because the sedan was the only car and I needed it after.
She had a list of six people and she got through two.
The first was a man at a hardware counter who she asked about the flood in 2008, and he talked for thirty minutes, and about eight of those minutes were about the flood. When we got back in the car I said we were behind.
“He said the bank in Coldbrook won’t write on anything over on this side of the tracks.”
I said we knew that.
“We know it from the data,” she said. “He knows which side of the tracks.”
We missed the last two appointments because she stayed at a church hall with a woman who ran the food pantry, and I sat in the car with the door open reading a corridor study, and I was irritated with her, and the paragraph that came out of that afternoon is one of the two or three best things this agency has published.
The Commission covers five counties and about ninety thousand people out of a converted post office in Marne. We do comprehensive plans for member communities, the long-range transportation plan for the state, hazard mitigation, corridor studies, and we administer four grant programs that nobody else will administer. There are nine of us. Our one vehicle is a 2009 sedan with a magnetic door sign that has blown off on the interstate twice and been mailed back to us once by a stranger in another county.
I have run this place since 2004. I retire in the spring.
Here is the sentence this Commission has used about Anneke Dries for twenty years, I wrote it. I have used it with a policy board, with two state agencies, and in a reference call for a job she did not get.
Give Anneke a good editor and she’ll give you something extraordinary.
That is not a slight. Every word of it is meant and most of it is true. It is also a description of a twenty-year arrangement in which the sorting she needed to learn was done for her, at speed, by a man who was good at it and fond of her, and I did not understand what I had been doing until a woman I have never met stood up at a hearing in 2024 and read a paragraph out loud.
The reference call was in 2018, for a deputy director job at a bigger commission two states away. The woman on the other end asked me the standard things and then asked what it would take for Anneke to run a department.
I said she’d need a strong number two on the writing side.
There was a pause on the line that I did not read correctly at the time.
“On the writing side,” the woman said.
I said yes, and elaborated, warmly, for perhaps ninety seconds. Anneke did not get the job. I do not know that my ninety seconds is why, and I know exactly what I said.
The plan update kicked off in the spring. Anneke is project lead for the first time. Her first public draft is due to me in nine days.
Lucius Pare, who ran this place before me, had one line about her that he used for the eighteen months their tenures overlapped.
“Somebody’s going to have to sit on that.”
First Drafts
A plan is a document and everything else is a meeting about a document.
That sounds cynical and is not. A comprehensive plan is the only instrument a small community has for saying, in a form that survives a change of council, what it intends to be. Everything downstream — the zoning text, the capital plan, whether the state will fund an intersection — reaches back to language somebody wrote. Get the language wrong and it does not matter what anybody meant.
Our process has a shape. A planner does a first draft, the director reviews, there is an internal version and a public review draft and a hearing draft and an adopted version, and the public review draft is what people call the plan. Nobody outside this building has ever seen a first draft of anything.
Her first drafts are on the server. Twenty-three years of them, in folders by project, named the way she names things, which is badly. I am, as far as I can establish, the only person who has ever opened one.
I went through a season of them in the winter. Not all — a season, four projects. The experience was not what I expected, and there is no revelation in it worth pretending to. Most of what is in there is exactly what I remembered: too long, insufficiently sequenced, occasionally a paragraph in the middle of a technical section that has no business being there and is the best thing on the page. What I had not expected was how consistent the cutting was. It is the same cut, every time, made by the same man, and after four projects you can see the shape of a mind in the negative space, and the mind is mine.
Tuyet Ngo asked me last year, in her second year here, whether there was a style guide.
I said there wasn’t, really, and that she should look at the last three plans.
“I did,” she said. “They all sound like you.”
I told her that was probably because I’d edited them, and she said right, and went back to her desk, and I felt reasonably good about that exchange for about ten months.
The sedan has a hundred and ninety-one thousand miles on it and a hole in the passenger floor pan that Tuyet Ngo covered with a cutting board from her own kitchen. Every budget cycle the policy board asks why we do not replace it, and every budget cycle I tell them the answer, and the answer has been the same answer since 2013, and Dorwin Pflug always says the same thing back, which is that he would not put his dog in that car.
I have announced the demolition derby at the county fair since 1994. I am not good at it. There is a man who has wanted the job for six years and everybody knows it, including me.
Fifty-one Pages
What Anneke does is not disorganization and I want that separated out before anything else, because disorganized is what this building said for twenty years and it is the wrong word by a wide margin.
She cannot write a sentence she does not believe. That sounds like a virtue and in a production environment it is a throttle: every paragraph has to clear something before it is allowed to exist, and the something is not a style guide, it is whether the thing is true about a place she has driven through and talked to people in.
Then, once a paragraph clears, it multiplies. One idea produces three more, each of them worth having, none of them subordinate to the others. What arrives on my desk at eleven at night is a field. Everything in it is good and nothing in it has been made to serve anything else, turning a field into an argument is somebody sitting down and deciding what serves what, which is a wholly different job.
The separate operation is learnable. That is the whole of what I have to say in this piece and it took me until last year to be able to say it. Sorting is a skill and people learn it the way people learn things, which is by doing it badly on something that matters and then doing it again. Anneke has never once had to do it. In twenty-three years, every field she has produced has been sorted for her, in the small hours, by me, on deadline, as a favour.
The mechanics of it, since nobody ever describes the mechanics. It is a printer and a red pen and a chair in a kitchen at half past one. You read for the spine — the thing the chapter is actually arguing — and once you have found it, everything that is not load-bearing on that spine comes out, and about a third of what comes out is better than what stays.
I kept a file of the good ones for a while. Sentences I had cut that I did not want to lose. I stopped in about 2012 because the file had gotten long enough to be a document about me rather than about her.
There is a version of this where the villain is contempt. That is not what happened here. I liked her drafts. I preferred her drafts. What I did with them, at two in the morning with a printer running, was carve out an argument and throw the rest away, and by six I had a document with my rhythm in it and her thinking underneath, and there was nobody in the building who could tell the difference and nobody outside it who ever saw the other version.
Gray Mattick came to us in 2009 and sprawls the way she sprawls, and when Gray sprawls in a policy board meeting it is called thinking out loud and people wait for him. He presents at the state conference. He has an opinion column in the regional association’s newsletter and I got him that. Nobody has ever asked me to sit on Gray. What the identical sprawl earns a man at that table, and what happens to his sentences instead of what happened to hers, gets its own tally elsewhere.
Nine staff. I have hired seven of them.
Gray stopped me out by the sedan one afternoon and asked why Anneke never put in for the state conference.
I said I didn’t know that she hadn’t.
“She has,” he said. “Twice. They want a sample.”
The Housing Chapter
The thing I cut in 2016 was seven pages and one recommendation.
The recommendation had teeth in it. It said that the Commission should condition its own transportation and infrastructure grant scoring — the four programs we administer, the money member communities actually want — on whether a community had adopted at least one of a short list of ordinance changes that would let somebody build something other than a detached house on a large lot. Not a mandate. We have no authority to mandate anything. A scoring preference, in a program we control, worth about two hundred thousand dollars a year in leverage.
The seven pages around it were about Ledgerton, and Straun, and a woman Anneke had interviewed who worked at the hospital in Marne and drove fifty-one minutes each way because there was nothing in Marne under the number she could pay.
I cut it for three reasons and all three were real. It was long. It was written in a register the policy board would have found emotional, and the policy board is nineteen elected officials from five counties who do not like being moved. And I judged — this is the one — that putting a condition on our own grant scoring would cost us two member communities inside a year, and a regional planning commission that loses members loses its levy support and then it loses everything.
I still think the third one might have been right. That one I have never resolved and I have stopped working at it.
What I did not do was send it back and tell her to make the case in twenty pages. I have gone back through my own email from that period, which is a foolish thing to do with a winter, and I never raised it with her at all. The clean version went to the board. She saw it when everyone saw it.
She said one thing about it, in the kitchen, about a week later.
“You took out the scoring.”
I said we’d have another run at it in the next cycle.
“Sure,” she said, and put her cup in the rack, and that was the last time either of us mentioned it for eight years.
Hazel
The hearing in 2024 was the housing study — a separate piece of work, state-funded, that came about because the region had a workforce problem that everybody had started calling a workforce problem instead of a housing problem.
Public comment ran an hour and ten. Most of it was what public comment is. A woman named Hazel Ivancic, who is a school bus driver in Ledgerton and who I had never seen at one of our meetings, came to the microphone with a piece of paper.
She said she wanted to read something and that it was from our own files.
Drafts are public record in this state. Anybody can ask. A reporter had asked for the 2016 working files two years earlier on a different question entirely, and the whole folder had gone out on a disc, and it had been sitting in somebody’s shed ever since, and Hazel had it because her nephew works at the paper.
She read about a page. It was Anneke’s, from the seven pages, and it was the part about the woman at the hospital and the fifty-one minutes, and then about what a town is actually deciding when it decides what it will let people build.
I have sat through something like six hundred public hearings. Nothing has ever happened in one.
The room went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when it has stopped waiting for its turn. Dorwin Pflug, who has been at this since before I was, was leaning forward with his glasses off. When she finished, she said she wasn’t asking us for anything, she just wanted it read into the record, and she sat down.
Hazel had not finished. She said one more thing before she sat down, which was that she had read the adopted plan too, and that it was fine, and that she had not understood until she read the other one that somebody at this agency had actually driven out to Ledgerton.
The chair asked whether staff wanted to respond.
Anneke was at the table with the study binder in front of her. She said, “It’s in the appendix,” which it was, and which is what a person says when she has been handed her own paragraph in public and has decided not to be the one who makes it a moment.
The Consultant
The state’s new housing rules landed in 2025.
Every regional body in this state now has to demonstrate that its funding programs are aligned with regional housing need. The rule is close enough to what she wrote in 2016 that when the guidance came out I read it through twice and went and found the file.
We hired a firm out of the city to help us stand up the scoring framework, because that is what you do, and because the state pays for it. Barrow Feld’s people were fine. They did what they were hired to do and they did it competently, and their framework is a defensible framework, and it recommends a scoring preference on our four programs conditioned on adopted ordinance changes.
I sat at the back of the policy board meeting where they presented it. Anneke sat two chairs from me because she had done the data appendix.
Dorwin looked at the slide for a while and then asked why we had not done this ten years ago.
Barrow’s project manager said that the policy environment had not been ready.
Dorwin said that was probably right.
I did not say anything. I have since composed the thing I could have said, and it is a decent piece of work, and it would have cost this Commission nothing. The reason it stayed in my mouth is that the answer to Dorwin’s question is sitting on a server with my name in the metadata as the last person to touch the file.
Anneke and I walked out to the lot together afterward.
I said the framework looked solid.
“It’s solid,” she said. She got her keys out. “Their scoring’s cleaner than mine was.”
I asked whether she’d told them that.
“They didn’t ask me,” she said, “and I didn’t say it to be asked,” and she got in her car.
Name Tents
We did a strategic planning retreat in 2019 with a facilitator paid for out of a state capacity grant. Two days at a lodge with a lake nobody went in.
The instrument was on the first afternoon. On the second morning the facilitator had our results printed on table tents — name on the front in large type, four letters underneath, and a two-line description under that. The exercise was to seat the room for balance rather than by department, which is a real technique and is not stupid.
Anneke’s tent said INFP.
Somebody laminated the tents afterward. I do not know who. They came back out at staff meetings for most of the following year, because they were there and because they had our names on them, and for the better part of a year this agency sat down every other week behind its own letters without anybody deciding that was the arrangement.
The facilitator’s packet had a back section that I read in 2019 and did not think about again until this spring. It says four letters stand in for a running order: the habit under the load, the one it travels out through, and the pair parked at the bottom that a person gets at deliberately or not at all. Which habit lands where for this one is spelled out on the page given over to the type, out of the sixteen that facilitator’s grid rested on.
The habit doing the work is a standard about purpose that she keeps to herself and did not get from anybody. In her case it fastens onto places and the people living in them, it runs the whole time, and it is why she cannot put a sentence on a page she does not believe. I had that filed as conscientiousness for twenty years. It works more like a gate. Nothing gets typed until it has been through, and that is why fifty-one pages existed — every one of those pages had been through.
The second habit is the one that moves it outward, and outward is the only direction it goes. An idea reaching it does not get narrowed; it branches, and every branch is worth something, and no branch has been made to serve any other. What leaves her is a field of true things. That is a first draft. It is also — and this Commission never once said this out loud — a large quantity of usable material that somebody now has to sort, and sorting is a separate operation and it can be taught.
The neighbouring version of this — the person with the same standard running through a faculty that stays on the physical thing in front of them — never produces the field at all. They produce a refusal and no material. Anneke produced the material every time and never got to keep it.
The two she has least of are the two that run an agency. Working the machinery from outside — scopes, deadlines, holding a person to a thing whether they agree with it or not. And keeping the concrete institutional past somewhere you can reach for it: what we actually did in 2011, what it cost, who objected. I have both. I have run this Commission for twenty-two years on those two and on nothing else, and every good idea that has left this building in that period came out of somebody else.
The plain part, and it should come from me because I am the one who benefited. If you are doing the substantive work on documents that go out over other names, you have a question about classification and pay before you have anything else, and there is a process for that wherever you work. If you work for a public body, your own drafts are almost certainly public record and you can ask for them, in writing, and they have to give them to you. And if you have been told for twenty years that you need a strong editor, that is a development plan nobody has ever written down — so ask for it in writing, with the training in it and a date on it, and see what comes back. None of that is a personality question and a table tent is no help with any of it.
The facilitator’s own notes say the questionnaire is a conversation opener, not an assignment tool, and that when people fill it in again a month afterward, something like a third come out in a different box, while the scales underneath stay about where they were.
At the end of the second day he went around the room and asked what had surprised us. Anneke said hers was accurate and that she had taken a version of it at twenty, at a college career centre, and been told it meant she should think about counselling or the ministry.
Somebody laughed. She laughed.
I had employed that woman for sixteen years at that point and it had never occurred to me to ask what she had wanted to be.
I asked her at dinner. She said she had wanted to write about places, which is what she does, and then she said the career centre had been trying to be kind, and that she had cried in the parking lot, and that she had been twenty and it had been raining.
Then she asked me what mine said, and I told her, and she said that tracked, and we talked about the lake.
Nine Days
The hearing knocked loose two things I had thought were finished.
The night in 2016, first. Fifty-one pages at eleven o’clock, which I have retold twice at state conferences as a fond thing about a colleague who runs long. What was on my desk that night was a completed piece of thinking with the evidence in it, produced by the only person at this agency who had gone and sat in Ledgerton, and what I did with it was take out the operative recommendation and keep the prose that supported the parts I was willing to defend. I have described that for a decade as editing. Editing is what you call it when the person gets the draft back.
Then the kitchen, and sure, and the cup in the rack. I have carried that as her being reasonable about a call that had to be made. She had asked me a question with no question mark on it — you took out the scoring — and I had answered with next cycle, and she had heard exactly what next cycle meant, and she put her cup away and did not raise it again for eight years and did not raise it at the hearing either, when a stranger handed it back to her in front of the whole room.
Things the tent left no space for. She is a genuinely unkind driver and swears at people through the windscreen in a way that startles everyone who has ever ridden with her; she has a daughter at university out of state and a divorce in 2014 that this office found out about from the insurance forms; and she has turned down two jobs I know of, both of which paid more, and she has never told me why, and I have not asked, and I have no theory I would want to put down.
Her draft is due in nine days. I told the policy board I would review it, which is the word we use.
She came by my office at the end of last week and asked, in a completely ordinary voice, whether I wanted the long one or whether she should take a run at cutting it first.
I said whichever was easier.
I have thought about that answer for six days. It is the exact shape of every answer I have given her since 2003 — generous, entirely sincere, and constructed so that the thing that has to happen will happen without either of us having to say what it is.
The draft came in this morning. I have it open. The first paragraph is unmistakably hers and it is nine lines long and there is a version of it that is four.
I called her. It rang out. What I left was a message asking her to come and see me tomorrow, and I said it was about the schedule, and it is not about the schedule, and I could hear myself picking the safer word while I was saying it.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.