Covering stories about things I don't like

I can’t remember the last time I wrote about a subject toward which I felt conscious antipathy.          

   

Until yesterday, that is.

Usually I write about things that fascinate or engage or amuse me: societal trends, parenting, the arts. Occasionally I write about things I don’t really know anything about, like cybersecurity or liposuction. And sometimes I write about things I didn’t know I was interested in until I started researching the story, like NFL quarterbacks.

But it’s typical of me that as soon as I dig my hands into the topic, I fall in love with it.

So it was strange yesterday morning to be doing an interview about something to which I have a genuine aversion. The Framingham History Center is running a special exhibit for the next several months about Shopper’s World, or to be more specific the original Shopper’s World, the indoor mall built in the early 1950s that forty years later was razed and replaced with an outdoor shopping plaza which is also called Shopper’s World.

The woman from the Framingham History Center sounded downright joyful as she told me how meaningful it had been to her to put together this exhibit of old photos of Shopper’s World, memorabilia from the stores, interviews with the structure’s earliest employees and shoppers.

But all I could think of, even as I asked questions and noted down her responses, was how much I dislike Shopper’s World.

It was effectively the country’s first shopping mall, though technically another one, in Seattle, beat it to opening day by a hair. And as I see it, that makes Shopper’s World the precursor to so many undesirable things that followed. Big box shopping. Automobile culture, in which errands are done by car. The demise of the downtown, and the crumbling of small local businesses. In fact, just last week I was working on an assignment about a last-ditch effort by community members in West Concord to salvage the West Concord 5&10, one of the area’s last remaining decades-old locally owned small businesses. Shopper’s World is, to my mind, emblematic of what ruined modern commerce: first shopping malls, then big box stores, then outdoor plazas, all of which fostered the movement toward shopping by car in big shopping centers rather than in the pedestrian-friendly downtown areas that preceded them.

But the article I was writing wasn’t really about what’s wrong or right with modern retail; it was about this particular exhibit. And so I suppressed my antipathy and tried instead to focus on what the woman from the historical society was telling me about the exhibit.

And eventually, just like with almost every story I work on, I began to feel more warmly toward it. This woman loved the exhibit she had put together, loved the response it was getting from visitors who told her about their first job or the first excursion they ever remember taking or their first date at Shopper’s World. She enthused about the Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins she served at a round-table discussion about Shopper’s World as they were putting the exhibit together, and she told me about the posters and memorabilia from the advertising campaign that brought 200,000 shoppers to opening day at Shopper’s World back in 1954.

I’m not sure whether this tendency to get drawn in by every subject I write about ultimately makes me a better or worse journalist. To some extent, I think it shows an unfortunate predilection for subjectivity. How effective a journalist can I be if I lose all cynicism as soon as I hear someone start talking about a subject they love?

And yet if I didn’t have this tendency, I’m not sure I’d be able to sustain a career as a journalist at all. What I love, and what I’ve always loved, is listening to people talk about their passions. It doesn’t matter, in the end, whether that’s a passion for building boats or playing football or performing vein surgery or mentoring underprivileged children or putting together an exhibit about a shopping mall. When people talk about what interests them, it interests me.

I still don’t like Shopper’s World, and I honestly still think society would be better off had it never been built and subsequently touched off the shopping mall movement. But even feeling that way, I think I can write an article that does justice to the historical society’s hard work on this exhibit. Creating it was someone’s passion, and telling the story of other people’s passions is my passion. And somehow amidst that paradox is where I’ve found my career.

Work I just can't pass up

It was late Friday afternoon and my editor at the Globe was calling to tell me that she’d decided the story idea she’d sent me earlier should be a full-length feature rather than just a short clip – and that she was therefore going to reassign it to another writer since I had two other articles on deadline for this weekend.

“No, let me keep it!” I exclaimed before I could give it much thought. “It’s exactly my type of story!”

And it is, too: a profile of a Boston-area writer who travels the country visiting major league ballparks so that he can then write mysteries for grade-school aged readers about the different parks and teams. Much as I lament the fact that I lack the hard-hitting drive of an investigative reporter or the tenacity of a political correspondent, I love the niche I’ve found for myself: features about not-so-famous people doing interesting things. Or, as I once put it after doing a story about the anomalously high number of twins in one grade in Carlisle and another one about kids with food allergies, “I do stories about twins, stories about food allergies, stories about twins with food allergies.” Or, as one friend has occasionally described my career, “Drawing water from a stone.” Of course, that was before I wrote a feature about him and his family that filled out three-quarters of a section cover on a recent Sunday.

But both of the other two stories I needed to work on this past weekend were exactly my type of story too, and my editor was just trying to lessen the burden on me.

Hearing myself protest to keep all three stories, I almost had to laugh. My editor didn’t know that we’d just moved two days earlier: my house was chock full of boxes to be unpacked, plus I had all the usual weekend responsibilities associated with kids and household; the truth is it was a terrible time for me to take on triple my usual workload.

But I just couldn’t say no, because I simply love writing feature stories and can never pass up the opportunity to do so. When I started freelancing for the Globe about six years ago, each assignment I received was a thrill beyond measure. Days I had an article published felt like my birthday, all day.

And that’s changed only slightly. It no longer feels like my birthday when I have a story in print, now that I’ve come to realize how few people actually read every story in the paper on a daily basis, and I no longer want to run around the house screaming with excitement every time an editor assigns me a story. But as witnessed this weekend, even now that I submit a weekly column and do two or three additional features every month, it still delights me beyond reason to have an assignment, two assignments, a whole pile-up of assignments.

I write features for a major city newspaper. What was long ago a dream and then later a novelty is now more like a regular job, or as regular a job as a freelancer can hope to have. But it still thrills me. And that, I have to believe, is just how a career should be.

Professional development: Acquiring a sense of restraint

My editor emailed me late yesterday afternoon to ask if I had any feature story ideas. As I drove later that evening to a meeting, I thought about different ideas, but kept dismissing them. This may sound like a defeatist attitude, but within the context of my journalistic career, it actually might represent progress.

When I started having features accepted by the Boston Globe, I was sun-dazzled with excitement. Having that byline was so important to me that I forgot being part of a Globe story might not be the highest priority of everyone I involved in my articles. It wasn’t a matter of celebrity; it was just that for me, being a regular freelance contributor to a major city daily was the culmination of a decade of striving for publication. Because in my mind, nothing was more important than writing for the newspaper, I grabbed every assignment I could get.

And then I learned some lessons the hard way. While I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve lost friends over any articles or essays I’ve run in the paper, I’ve definitely had some sobering moments. An article I was elated to be assigned about a controversial Halloween celebration in one neighborhood resulted in one of the residents of the neighborhood calling me to express her displeasure over my use of the phrase “granite countertops.” A story about the high number of twins in our town caused a mother to be upset with me for not letting her younger, non-twin son appear in the photo with his brother and sister. And when I wrote a first-person essay that I thought was lighthearted and entertaining about “divorcing” one book club so that I could join another, it received a frosty response from some, if not all, members of both book clubs.

Sometimes, too, I’m the one who ends up at the sharp end of my own judgment. I was thrilled to have an essay I wrote on my son and his first protective cup (as in underwear worn for baseball) embraced by a Globe editor – until I saw it in print and wondered how many pedophiles were reading my essay about my son’s private parts. But it didn’t teach me a lesson: a year later I wrote an essay about my daughter’s imaginary friends – and had similar qualms when I saw it in print.

Gradually, though, I’m finally developing what I consider a little bit of journalistic maturity. I no longer get so carried away with my own delight in self-expression that I completely overlook the possible reactions of the people I might be writing about. While it’s true that earlier this month I published an essay about being annoyed when my kids’ teachers assigned “family homework,” I made sure to qualify at least three times in the same essay how much I like and respect the entire faculty and administration at my children’s school. Besides, I reasoned, I’ve never known their teachers to read the Boston Globe.

I learned within six hours of that article’s publication that parents were clipping it out at the breakfast table and hand-delivering it to the classrooms, so there went that protective measure. But none of them took offense. Not too much, anyway.

Still, my newfound sense of restraint is probably a generally good thing. Except that yesterday it was preventing me from settling on any good ideas at all. A feature about over-the-top luxuries at our school’s fundraising auction? Sure to alienate some of the parents who spent a lot of money at the auction, and equally sure to elicit fiery responses from opponents of public school fundraising. A story about a teardown controversy in a nearby town? No; it was a town where I had several clients for other freelance assignments, and I didn’t want to make any enemies there either. I thought briefly about a family I know slightly who recently lost a child to heroin overdose and have been working hard to bring attention to the issue of drug use in the affluent suburbs. Sure, I told myself, and have heroin dealers on my case? Maybe not.

It’s not professionally productive for me to grow paranoid. I find story ideas by staying abreast of what’s going on around me, and inevitably, friends and neighbors are involved. And often they appreciate my drawing attention to their causes and projects. But overall, it feels like a new stage of wisdom that I have these second thoughts now. Not at the expense of ever coming up with another story idea. But if I avoid future episodes of being blacklisted by my book club, that’s just fine as an outcome.

A goal reached: No work over Christmas week!

Late last week, I looked at my roster of work in progress and upcoming assignments and realized something tantalizing: it would be possible for me to wrap up all open assignments before Christmas and not have any new ones before New Year’s. And thus I set the goal of doing just that: turning around every undone work-related task within the next several days and seeing nothing on my work-to-do list by the time the kids’ school vacation began, which is a little bit after noon today.

And I did it. What’s remarkable about this to me isn’t that I managed to get through my list but that I was even able to acknowledge that as a goal. As a freelance contractor, my work life is generally devoted to the pursuit of accruing ever more assignments. Because my freelance salary will never match what I made as a full-time corporate employee, it never seems like I’m doing enough. And I never turn work down. As a result, I never quite reach the bottom of the pile.

Until now. There’s one corporate assignment I’m still in the middle of, but I turned copy over to the project editor and I don’t expect her to review it before Christmas, so even though revisions might be waiting for me by next week, there’s nothing more I need to do on it right now. I have one story under way for the newspaper, but it involves a school that is on break until after New Year’s, so there’s nothing much I can do on that one either.

In general, I like to keep busy professionally. A freelancer must by nature be greedy about work and feel that enough is never enough. Unlike when I was a corporate employee and was all too happy to snap my laptop shut on Friday at 5 and walk out the door, I like knowing there’s always a bit of a backlog waiting for me; with this kind of work, it’s not a desirable thing to see the well run dry.

But the past two months have been robust for me in terms of work, and it will be okay to have a week or two with no new assignments. I’m excited to have the same vacation schedule as my children. Normally when they are home from school during vacations or professional days, we have a good schedule worked out: I work during the morning and then devote the afternoon to them. But this week and next, I won’t even need those mornings. They neither need nor expect my undivided attention every minute of the day – they are old enough and independent enough that they both have things they like to do on their own, or with friends – but what a luxury it will be to make myself available to them without the stipulations of needing just an hour to get this article done or just a little time this morning to conduct phone interviews.

Psychologically, the situation of being deadline-free just puts me in a different frame of mind than usual. Even the projects that are awaiting information from other people – like my manuscript, in search of a publisher – isn’t on my mind this week, since it’s easier to just assume that everyone else is taking the week off as well and won’t have any news for me until after New Year’s. In the past, time away from work tended to involve thinking about more work: drafting new pieces or seeking out article ideas. But for now, I’m sated. I’m simply not going to think about work this week, or partway into next if possible. I’m even going to take the next two days off from daily blogging.

Instead, along with having time with my children, I’m looking forward to some household projects, visits with friends, maybe snowshoeing. (Getting the kids out on snowshoes would be an astounding feat, but a mom can dream.) Maybe in a few days I’ll have recovered from the mad dash of holiday baking and cooking enough that I’ll want to do some more cooking. Probably the kids and I will observe our annual tradition of going to Starbucks to drink hot chocolate and write thankyou notes one of the days following Christmas.

At the moment, I have three more hours while they are still at school, so I think I’ll use the time wisely by wrapping their presents. They can help me with other wrapping when they get home. And maybe, as I resolved in this blog yesterday, I’ll try to do some housecleaning.

It’s wonderful to be on vacation. I feel like a college student done with finals. I’m really grateful for all the work I’ve had lately. And I’m equally grateful to be taking a short break from all of it.