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.

Scents and sensibility

This article in yesterday’s Boston Globe opened with what seemed like an obvious point: “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.”

Of course they are, I thought. The article went on to explain new efforts under way to include scents in historical depictions: for example, “Jorvik Viking Center in York, England, is famous for taking visitors right into the smells of Viking life as part of its re-created Viking village. Dale Air, an environmental scenting company, imbued the center’s exhibits with smells that would have been present at the time - right down to the odor of a fish market and a latrine.”

And then in this morning’s Globe was a book review of a memoir by a woman whose intended career path in the culinary arts became derailed when she lost her sense of smell in an accident, emphasizing again the importance of smell in our perceptions of the world.

While I might not rush to a historical site specifically for the sake of inhaling the odor of a fish market and a latrine, I always find discussions about scents interesting, because they matter so much to me, and I know it’s not unusual to feel this way. In just a few minutes’ time yesterday, I made this list of ten scents, odors and aromas that always carry the same very specific connection for me:

Gasoline: Boating and waterskiing on the Maine lakes of my childhood summers

Grease in a frying pan: The apartment building in which my husband lived during our college years

Moth balls: My paternal grandparents’ lakeside vacation house in Maine

Coconut oil: The trip to Aruba that Rick and I took in the mid-1990s

A certain kind of furniture polish: my maternal grandparents’ guest house in Colorado, but also my aunt and uncle’s house in New England, since they had the same kind of antique furniture and probably used the same polish

Lemon Pledge spray: Tuesday afternoons of my childhood, which was the day our housecleaner came to our house each week

Industrial strength cleaner: a particular hallway (the one on the lower level of the Performing Arts Center) at my high school

Wet indoor/outdoor carpeting: the tennis club my parents belonged to when I was growing up, where a favorite privilege was getting to drink a can of Coke while watching them play tennis

Creosote: a bed and breakfast in Edinburgh where I once spent several days (though I can’t remember why it smelled of creosote)

Pepperoni pizza: the basement of my freshman dorm in college (the exercise room, where I worked out every evening, was adjacent to the campus pub)

And there’s a crisp, chilly, earth-like scent that every year fills the air in Carlisle on October nights: this to me is the quintessential smell of home.

Aromatic memories make for good writing prompts. Any of the above would be a good place to begin an essay. And I’ll keep adding to my list.

What cell phones can do for writers

Among the timeless tips that writers have handed down over the centuries, such as “Write what you know” – the value of which I blogged about earlier this week – has always been to take any and every opportunity to eavesdrop. Snippets of conversations among strangers have always provided fiction writers with an endlessly rich source of ideas. Why did she say that? What did she mean? Were his feelings hurt? Has she ever said that before? Imagining the meaning behind what was said gives writers new ideas for plot; contemplating the vaguer implications of just how it was said leads to nuanced characters with complex personalities.

And this is one area in which cell phone use has made life for writers far more interesting than it used to be. Now we can overhear not just conversations between two people who are talking in person but countless snippets from passers-by talking into their phones – often loudly and unguardedly. Annoying cell phone conversations may be pet peeves for other citizens, but for writers, they are a gold mine. At least that’s what I try to tell myself every time I start to feel irritated by the noise pollution of people all around me having one-sided conversations.

Last month I was walking through downtown Aspen on a warm, beautiful summer evening. Everywhere were visitors and locals alike basking in the beauty of the sun setting over the mountains. A quartet from the Aspen Music School had set up chairs and music stands and were playing classical melodies. Small children in bathing suits were darting through the street fountain. Never had the town looked so enticing to me.

Just then a teenage girl wandered into my field of vision. “I am so bored!!!” she screamed into her phone. “I’m in Aspen and I have nothing to do!”

Well, I thought, that’s another perspective. I always feel like there’s more to do in Aspen than anywhere else I’ve ever been. You can shop, attend lectures on a variety of topics, hike, bike, fish, raft, dine, stroll. But this young woman’s perspective was different from mine. She apparently would rather be anywhere else. Were I trying to come up with a fictional scenario at the moment, beginning with an imagined character sketch of her would be a great starting point. Or I could begin by imagining her circumstances, which might lead to a concept for plot: how had she landed here so unwillingly, what was everyone with whom she was traveling doing, and what would she herself rather be doing and where?

So these days, instead of finding it annoying when people talk on their phones on train cars or shops, I try to appreciate the narrative potential of the situation. Everyone has a story, and listening to phone calls gives us an inkling of what that story might be. From that point, we’re free to imagine the rest as accurately or absurdly as we wish. It’s a gift to writers, really: one that I am trying hard to remember to accept graciously.

Write what you don't exactly know

On the two-hour drive to Portland yesterday evening, the kids and I listened to Tom Ashbrook interview Josh Ritter on WBUR’s “On Point.”

Josh Ritter has long been a songwriter, and recently published his first novel, Bright’s Passage. I’m generally interested in what anyone at all has to share about the writing process, but I was particularly interested in the reflections of someone who has covered such widely differing genres.

One comment Ritter made (not having a transcript, I dare not try to actually quote him, so I’ll qualify this in advance by saying all of this is paraphrased from memory) was that while the old chestnut “Write what you know” is solid advice, he also likes to dwell on those topics about which he is puzzled – those which he does not exactly “know.” In my experience, this is a very effective insight. Occasionally I’m invited into an elementary or middle school classroom to talk about writing, and one thing I like to tell the students is “I’m now going to give you two opposite pieces of advice. Write about what you are certain of. And write about what you are unsure of. Examples in the first category: What skiing fast downhill feels like, how your grandparents’ house smells, the reasons you had fun on your last vacation. In the second category: anything that leaves you with questions or a sense of being on the fence.” (What I really mean is “a sense of ambivalence,” but in a classroom setting I'm not always sure the kids know that word.)

One of my favorite writing exercises is to start with “I’m not sure how I feel about….” There are thousands of ways to finish that phrase. Angels. Universal health care. Living in a small town. American pioneers. International travel. Visits from extraterrestrials. Anything about which your beliefs waver makes for good writing, just as anything you can describe with no sense of uncertainty at all does. Write what you know…and what you don’t.

Sometimes when I’m teaching, I call this “the Suzanne exercise,” because it reminds me of a colleague from long ago who was one of the least ambivalent people I’ve ever known. Suzanne saw everything as black and white, from people’s personalities to politics to workplace issues. She seemed to have no capacity for ambivalence at all. And not surprisingly, she was not a writer, or any kind of artist at all, as far as I remember. What could she have written about? There was nothing over which she was puzzling.

Josh Ritter feels otherwise, and so do I. Dwell in the murkiness of the not-quite-known, said Ritter on “On Point,” and I absolutely agree. The areas about which you just don’t have the answer provide the richest sources of writing material. So write what you know, but write also what you don’t.