My Writing in 2015
Much like 2012, 2013, and 2014 before it, I wrote more in 2015 than I ever have before. I probably wrote more in 2015 than I did in all those other years combined. This is for two reasons: 1) I had a stable writing job for most of the year and 2) I then, quite suddenly, no longer had that job.
The job was the staff writer for Creator, a website run by the co-working space startup WeWork. I would write to three pieces for this site every day, which I guess isn’t too much, but at times it felt really hard. What made it hardest, I guess, was a lack of clarity over what I was supposed to be writing. Nobody knew what they were doing, and anything I was told was in a vague buzzword code. I tried my hardest at it, but the place was sterile and paranoid from the start. I’ve already written a first draft of what I’m gonna write about my time there. I’ve never linked to my writing there before, but I’ll do so here, just because I worked really hard at my job, not because all the pieces are good. Working there was weird, I want to emphasize. Anyway I didn’t do a lot of freelancing this year because of the job.
What I did do, though, I’m extremely proud of. During down hours at work, and when I could at home, for the first months of the year I would work constantly on a piece about a woman named Michelle Cusseaux, killed in 2014 in Phoenix, AZ. Researching the case, contacting people over and over for interviews, filing FOIA requests, and framing the narrative piece was long, solitary work (my buddy Doug helped with the FOIA requests, to be fair). It’s all part of the job, I know, but doing it as a freelancer, all of it after long work days, looking over my shoulder to see if any large publication had scooped it, was rough. I didn’t know a lot of numbers, but during the week I published my final article on the subject, “What Michelle Cusseaux’s Death Says About Arizona’s Mental Health Crisis,”for Gawker, Creator got 20,000 hits. My story on Cusseaux got over 32,000. That felt really good.
When I had the job, I realized I had the spare money to start a little vertical of my own, a long-running dream, something related to the Cusseaux article. I called it The Membrane and wanted it to focus on mental health: not just in the feel-good victory story sense, not just in the long-running expose sense, but somewhere in between: substantive journalism, day in and day out, about mental health. That was, and still is the dream. I’m very proud of the writing currently up on The Membrane, and have myriad ideas on what could be done with the site in the future. As the site progressed, I found myself more and more immersed in studying how violence and mental health interact on a societal, structural level. I started a series about the topic, connecting, say, mental hospital funding to violent, headline grabbing behavior. Without money though, and the stability it brings, and the way it allows me to pay freelancers, I can’t see the site getting updated frequently in the future.
Maybe if my job search (actively looking, please feel free to get at me with opportunities!) truly bottoms out I’ll devote myself to this full time. Part of me really wants to do that. If there was a way to crowdfund working on The Membrane, I’d want to do that, but for the life of me I can’t see how I could make that happen. Maybe I’m not enough of a disruptor, but beyond the idea of like, the inherent appeal of journalism, I don’t know what could be done to drum interest up.
I wrote a few small pieces for Hopes And Fears, research-based pieces based on weirdo foreign databases and contacting WHO stations across the world and interviews based on moments in the news. The first of these pieces was a real team effort, a lot of people at H&F cramming, I just got the headline. I also wrote all the notes. For that second one, an interview about when Ben Carson talked about how all the Jews needed in pre-war Germany was guns (remember that?), I asked questions of a Holocaust expert that I thought got to the heart of why people sought out the genocide as a catch-all for their modern problems.
On the music front, I wrote my first ever book review! It was for Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, a blinding flash of a book. That marked the second review of the year I wrote relating to one of my all-time favorite bands, Sleater-Kinney, for The Jewish Daily Forward. I also wrote about their optimistic album, No Cities to Love. The book review was a more interesting challenge, just because I hadn’t done one before, but I felt the same principles apply: write about what’s there.
I also wrote a profile of my favorite band for Rolling Stone, a dream come true. Like, the literal dream since I broke the spine of my collection of Lester Bangs columns in high school. I went up to Providence, Rhode Island, and wrote a happy piece of music journalism looking at Downtown Boys and their scene in the city. I just wanted to be a conduit in this piece, try to translate half the energy I saw there. I relied on two books for inspiration, one of them being Sara Marcus’ indispensable Girls To The Front, which offers crucial context on how the riot grrl movement viewed, among may other things obviously but for the sake of this essay it’s important, technology. The other was A Wailing Of A Town, “An Oral History of Early San Pedro Punk And More”, 1977–1985, compiled by Craig Ibarra. Nothing in this book really played into the piece factually, but it gave me a calm-yet-excitable vibe that carried the energy of my writing.
The other thing I really did for my writing this year was take a writing workshop at Catapult, a new experience for me. I’ve never taken a substantive writing class before , in journalism or any other style. I’m often paranoid about things like AP style. I didn’t get this in the class, but I did get something I’ve found to be woefully lacking in journalism: an active interest in helping me improve my writing holistically. Granted, I was paying for the privilege, but having it was electrifying. A constant discussion, a constant elevation of work and determining what could be cut away. I don’t do a whole lot of non-journalistic reading, getting exposed to it in the first time in forever was refreshing. I wrote two essays for the class and one right afterwards in its wake, totaling to exactly 13,700 words at first edit. I’m very unsure of what to do with all those words, hopefully 2016 will clarify things.