Just over a week ago today, standing atop the tallest summit in Maine, I was seized with the urgent notion that I must return to school. The trip was a much-needed capstone to a rather uneventful summer—getting lost in the backcountry of America’s Northeast—and the realization atop Mount Katahdin surprised me, not in the sense that it felt peculiar, but only in the way it felt to have gone neglected for so long.
I’m glad that I returned in time to enroll. In the my short week here on campus I have begun to recall that the things I appreciate in school and the university setting have much in common with all that I enjoy in the act of writing and reporting: meeting new people, the exposure to new ideas—or finding new ways to approach old ideas, the excitement of curiosity, the satisfaction gained from striving to creating something meaningful and, of course, the pleasure of a great story. One of my favorite journalists, Ira Glass, celebrated host and producer of This American Life, sums up the process of writing best: “the pleasure of discovery. The pleasure of making sense of the world.”
My interest in feature writing does not fall very far from the tree of my inspiration and those whose writing I admire. I am very much in disagreement with those “crusty old-timers” who treat “features” as “nonessential stuff,” as Tim Harrower writes in Inside Reporting. Or maybe that is exactly why I am interested in feature writing. I view features (from what I understand of them) as very much alive and vibrant, and not sterilized with ‘nothing but the facts.’ And it seems more consistent with the way I like to write and who I am to declare that the people and stories captured in a feature often feel more real than factual, inverted-pyramid structured stories.
In this course, I hope to learn how to craft my writing into something that is publishable. I could really benefit from instruction in interviewing technique, and guidance with regard to what may or may not be a good story idea. Most of my favorite journalists and publications use the first-person voice liberally, so much so that it drives the narrative. I anticipate that one of my biggest challenges will be to write lively and compelling features without relying on my own place in the story. But I’m up for the challenge, and with help, I look forward to creating some choice articles that will bring me closer to my goal of being published.
My name is Greg Monroe. I like short stories, slow-cookin’, mountains and lakes. I make a mean campfire. I play the ukulele. And secretly, I wish I were a semi-professional hockey player for the team of some craggy coastal town in New England. I’ve been an avid writer. I’ve been an amateur writer. It would be a joy to be a professional writer.
