By Scott Thomas Anderson

Henry R. Luce, the founder of Time magazine, once said, “I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.”

As a young reporter, Dan Araujo was immersed in the polarity of that heartbeat, finding that the great and the grim of human possibility were both resonating through his coverage zone.

Raised in San Lorenzo, he got an early taste for the muckraking grind after he took a staff position at the Heyward Daily News. Araujo’s main beats were police and local politics. An avid poetry lover, he was also typing up copy on what art and culture brought to the community. The yin and yang of those experiences would later inform Araujo’s various pursuits when he moved to the Sierra foothills.

In 2005, most California newspapers were experiencing management changes and constant shakeups: That’s when Araujo left the Heyward Daily News to begin freelancing for publications around the East Bay Area. Over time, he began charting a different course. Araujo’s new passion became screenwriting. Whether punching up original dialog or script-doctoring for producers, he was always most comfortable working in the horror genre.

“I liked horror scripts because, with those, they could be allegorical, but they could also be cheap to make,” he remembered. “You don’t have to be working with big budgets.”

Araujo was slowly learning how to develop story exposition that played to his natural strengths. Nevertheless, the emotional frustration that comes with trying to make art within a codified field began taking a toll. Araujo says that he started feeling burned out, eventually stepping away from writing altogether.

“When it comes to how homogenized some of the writing landscape can be, it can really feel stifling,” he explained. “ One of the reasons I gave up, at first, is because I had gotten to this point where my head was just filled with the question, ‘Am I doing this right?’ And that just zapped any spirit there was.”

The energy would return. But first, there were other changes on the horizon. Eight years ago, Araujo decided to move to Auburn to be closer to his family. He ultimately settled into life in North Placer, meeting new friends and starting to connect with people on its creative scene. Then, two years ago, Araujo was watching director Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously when he felt the narrative impulses coming back into him. He had long dreamt about writing a plot-driven action-adventure tale that was also a convincing love story. Studying Weir’s classic take on that gambit was now causing some fresh ideas to flow. 

“I had to get back to what made me want to write in the first place,” Araujo reflected, “and find that inspiration.”

The adopted Auburnite soon began jotting the first lines of his novel “Close Proximity.”

When the final page was done, Araujo had shaped the story of a hard-living P.I., Jeff, and played-out actress, Moira Lee, whose lives were intersecting within the tense milieu of coastal police corruption.

It won’t be lost on some readers that the East Bay where Araujo worked as a journalist eventually became known as California’s geographic epicenter for criminal cops. In the last decade, numerous police officers in Oakland, Antioch and Pittsburg have been investigated for everything from bribery and theft of public funds, to excessive force and exploiting teenagers.    

“I recalled working around that from my journalism years out in the Bay,” Araujo acknowledged, “and just being in that procedural type of atmosphere.” 

One person who enjoyed how Araujo’s reporting experience informed the finished story of “Close Proximity” is Auburn resident and retired journalist John Bowman. Like Araujo, Bowman wrote about courts and the justice system during his early years in newspaper work. After decades of experience in the Midwest, Bowman was recruited to the Golden State to run the Roseville Press-Tribune for a time. After years of doing that job, and then a stint at a Bay Area magazine, Bowman and his journalist wife, Val Bowman, decided to retire in Auburn.

They have both read “Close Proximity.”

 “He really has a gift for fast-paced action,” John Bowman said of Araujo’s style. “At one point, there is a car chase through the streets of San Francisco, and, talk about a page-turner. I admire his ability to do that.”

Val, a veteran columnist and feature writer, has her own assessment.

“When I read it, I was impressed with his way of description,” Val noted. “The scenes are rendered well. I think the book also has strong dialog.” 

Araujo has been marketing the book at library events and through a number of online venues. He’s also recently had a part-time return to his life in journalism. For more than a year, Araujo has been working as a freelancer reporter for The Auburn Journal. More recently, he launched a new show on Auburn Community Television called Work in Progress. The program will be a platform for Araujo to interview other Placer County creatives and lovers of the arts. The first episode has already aired, featuring Auburn memoirist Hannah Woodsford, who’s working on a remembrance of a number of people in the city who died under mysterious circumstances.    

John and Val Bowman are among the hill-dwellers keeping tabs on the show, though they also hope Araujo carries on with the written word.

“I’m really encouraging him to write another book,” John stressed.

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, CapRadio, Hmong Daily News, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.