The Jim Foley Story

- By Jim Hicks

Jim Foley with staff and graduating students at the Care Center in Holyoke. From left to right: Irma Medina (Care Center staff), Glenda Suarez (Care Center graduate and teen mom), Jim Foley, Aimee Loiselle (English GED Teacher), and Maria Salgado (Care Center Transition Counselor). Photo courtesy of the Care Center.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the murder of the journalist, educator, and humanitarian James W. Foley. As his mother, Diane Foley—founder of the Foley Foundation, an NGO that has developed a safety curriculum for journalists and advocates for the release of US citizens held captive abroad—wrote yesterday in the New York Times, bereaved mothers “don’t need anniversaries for things [they] can never forget.” The rest of us, however, would do well to take a moment and reflect on the life of James Foley, a decade after his death—to remember who he was and how he chose to live.

Although he earned his MFA at the institution where I teach and where the Massachusetts Review was founded, I myself did not know Jim Foley. A number of his friends, however, are also friends of our magazine, and we have been fortunate to publish their words—as well as those of Foley himself. Jim’s MFA thesis was a vivid, self-critical, often sardonic fictionalization of his experience working in Phoenix for Teach for America, and you can find an excerpt from it here. As Martín Espada recalls in an interview reflecting on his time as a friend and mentor for Foley, Jim continued his work as community activist during his years in Amherst by volunteering at the nearby Holyoke Care Center, a program to support higher education for young mothers and low-income women. A blog post we published back in 2014 gives a glimpse into that work—a collective poem composed by Foley and his students where they imagine their personal vision of peace.

Polls show that these days people don’t tend to trust or value the work that journalists do, despite the danger of imprisonment or death they face. In our Casualty issue (a collection of texts documenting the legacy of war, published ten years after 9/11), Charlie Sennott, founder of the international news service GlobalPost (where Jim Foley was working when he was taken by ISIS), tells a harrowing tale about the risks and caprice that determine the fate of journalists: while covering the war in Iraq, he gets separated from his brother Rick, a photographer. Hours later, Charlie helps to save a wounded insurgent from an angry mob, unaware that this same man had tried to kill his own brother less than an hour before. Charlie simply does what he believes is right and finds the enemy soldier transportation to a hospital.

Among the writers who remember James W. Foley, some were also his classmates. In 2015, we published a poem by Ben Balthaser, titled simply “For Jim Foley, October 18, 1973-August 19, 2014.” This coming Friday, as our weekly public affairs post, we’ll have the remembrance of another friend from those MFA years, Sejal Shah.

So, what’s your story? What values, dedication, and courage do you bring to the one life you’ve been given? And how much of that life are you willing to sacrifice, to give back? Not questions, perhaps, that anyone ever fully answers on their own. At some point, though, they will be answered, by us or for us.

Though I did not know Jim Foley, I do know something he knew, far better than most—unlike stories, lives must be judged, not by how they end, but by how they are lived. 

JIM HICKS is Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review.