Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

A few years ago, I approached someone writing for a now-defunct outlet about a factual error in the story. After we went back and forth, they said that “new journalism” doesn’t get hung up on facts and official statements.

I definitely did not want to be a new journalist.

In The Writing Years

In my high school days, we read a lot of great literature but did not write much. Summaries to be sure we understood the texts rather than analysis. But there were moments – I was sitting on a lawn chair in the front yard toward the end of my senior year, pouring through Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for my three page essay. Like Hermes and Thoth smacked me over the head, I drew an actual parallel between JC and my all-time favorite novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Alexsander Solzhenitsyn. I scribbled furiously before the thought floated away, earned an A+ on my paper, and then swept the AP English exam with a resounding score that bounced me out of first year college classes. Bam.

Of course I don’t remember the thought now – it has been 36 years. But I remember that feeling. I can close my eyes and go right back to that moment. It was exhilarating. And then it was gone as I headed off to college.

Skipping English 101 required me to take more advanced courses that focused on writing. An essay I wrote about my high school trigonometry class was published to my secret delight. Still, I was caught up in skimping margins or saying nothing with many clauses (there it is!) when I had no idea what the fuck to say.

Things changed in my junior year during Microeconomics. We had to write our test answers in the blue book. I did pretty well. My teacher told me I was the only student to use an introductory paragraph and write a conclusion. She said that wasn’t necessary. Obviously, I continued to do that very thing because I enjoyed the notion of being an above average writer.

Still, I graduated college with just mediocre writing skills overall. I moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I faced down my nemesis – the graduate seminar. I did not belong in graduate school because I had no interest. When I switched my focus to political philosophy, things got exciting. I was writing 2 or 3 essays per week, revising 1 or 2 with a lot of tough feedback from my instructors. All I did was read and write and drink beer at the local poli sci/sociology bars.

Sentences Forged in Graduate School

Not every paper was great or even good, but I had my moments. It was baptism by ink cartridge. Then I hit my master’s thesis. I was in this program where I was earning a master’s degree and ph.d at the same time. I don’t know why I agreed to that.

I selected the topic of “Art and Politics in the Writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn” and dove in. I loved th Russian writers. I didn’t read in Russian. Nonetheless, I was so moved by Dostoevsky’s passage about children suffering in The Brothers Karamazov. I spiraled, scoured every single thing Solzhennitsyn wrote, looking for the same level of guidance, the same moral clarity.

Can you imagine what all three volumes in The Gulag Archipelago do to the mind of 23 year old young woman? I plowed through Pushkin, Tergenev, Google, and of course Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with my fervor unguided by cooler heads. Not the greatest idea.

That’s another blog post.  The exquisite angst of The First Circle  alongside the nagging bewilderment about the lack of female characters.

Also, my mind was breaking apart as the medication treating my alleged unipolar depression was slowly giving rise to a monstrous mania that left me in the closet, pleading for help. I packed my Solzhenitsyn books and ran away to Western Kentucky.

I still have the books. And the nagging bewilderment.

I wrote letters for that job and suddenly realized I could fucking write. Words poured out of me. I went back to graduate school and started working in human services. I wrote and wrote and wrote. My supervisor banned me from using semi colons or hyphens and eventually ellipsis. There was a jar in the office for grammatical and spelling errors.

The Men Tried to Silence Me

I moved on to other jobs. My favorite supervisor told me to tone down my writing because I was setting the bar too high. He also told me to drop the AP English language from my talking because I made other people feel stupid. I had to self-censor my natural voice because the words I chose seemed pretentious.

Another supervisor told me that my writing conveyed emotions and that wasn’t the point of writing. By the time he banned adverbs, the silencing had built up another level of pressure in my poor broken mind and I knew that I could not work. The silencing created anxiety, made me doubt my capacity to communicate.

I was still producing content for letters, newsletters, group emails, and my blog. But I was broken inside and the words dried up. Writing terrified me. It reminded me as a child I was told not to write things down that other people could read. So I never kept a journal non diary. I had them, I just left their pages empty while I tried desperately to process my life without this essential skill.

After I left the paid workforce, it took me about two years to find my voice again. It seems writing memorial posts gave me a new sense of purpose, a space where adverbs and multi-syllabic words had value. In this space, I used words to stir up emotions, not tamp them down.

I contributed to other publications. I hoped to learn from various editors, but mostly they let me run amok slowing my roll to correct spelling errors. Other editors put me through my paces with four or eight staffers weighing in to battle over every little thing – that was very confusing. I felt punished or stupid; surely was an in between space where editors helped me learn, not micromanage. Granted, I’m a terrible copy editor so I can certainly welcome that help. But I want to learn how to become a better writere.

The stories I carry from all of the years I was silenced, I deserve to share them even just with myself. Finding exquisite joy in literature that is both Soviety and Christian with a heaping dash of Romam-Greco framing is just … surely there were better choices for me. I swung to C.S. Lewis then Ayn Rand, back and forth until I settled for cozy mystery paperbacks from the used bookstore. See, that’s a story, right?

As media died, opportunities to do ‘citizen journalism’ dried up. But I had my blog. So I’m okay. Citizen journalism is the worst phrase, perhaps second only to ‘new journalism.’ Maybe. Or maybe they are the same thing.

Now I can see that I did have the education and experiences necessary (in my own mind) to identify as a journalist. I’ve spent a bit of time this past year with journalists. I fit in. They don’t judge me for my failure to write our numerals or my semicolon fetish. They certainly don’t try to silence me.

Wikipedia Sees the Journalist In Me

You know why I took this step now? Some editor on Wikipedia who repeatedly removed “is an American journalist” from my Wiki.

So I’m officially accepting the title of journalist. No, I’m claiming this identity that I’ve earned since that day I was curled up in a lawn chair writing about Shakespeare and Solzhenitsyn with enthusiasm, delight, and a rush that led me into my convoluted pathways. A pathway that was not literal, but a metaphor for my rightful place in the world.

It is important to emphasize that while it has mostly been men who’ve tried to silence me, there are several male journalists who have inspired me, who believe in me. I’m not going to name names (except Chris Potter). You probably know who the kind, decent, and talented storytellers are in your papers, on your computers, and even a few on tv. Some of them are men.

In conclusion, let me quote one of my favorite lines. “So let it be written, so let it be done.”

It just dawned on me that line was uttered by an actor of Russian descent, one of the few Indigenous or non-white actors in that film about Egyptians. Hmmm …