What I Wrote and What I Wish I Wrote in 2015
I’ve spent this year, my second as a working journalist, trying to bridge what Ira Glass has called “the gap” between work that has potential and work that’s actually good.
“For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
So I’ve been working. I reported stories this year in New York, Montana, Idaho, and now Alberta. I also traveled to Illinois and DC to learn from other education reporters and audited Kevin Coyne’s column-writing class at Columbia. After my American work visa expired (attempts to recruit a Green Card Husband failed; thanks for nothing, Matt!) I worked as a summer reporter at the Edmonton Journal. I’ve since landed at another newspaper — the Edmonton Examiner — but continue to freelance for the Journal, Canadian Running, and other publications.
This year I continued pursuing two beats I studied in J-School: education and obituaries. I wrote about the four-day school week phenomenon in Idaho schools (and talked about it on WNPR). I covered issues facing teachers in schools on American Indian reservations in Montana. My favourite obits profiled a beloved yoga instructor, a French-language crusader, a dietitian who played golf into her 90s, and a doctor who specialized in occupational lung diseases — all fascinating people who poured their hearts into their careers and touched many.
Other favourite stories from this year included a feature on a man who spends hours hunting for strangers’ lost jewelry, a story about people who receive prank calls from their home phone numbers, and one about a man whose urban flock of sheep went unnoticed by Edmonton animal control officers for decades. For print mags I wrote a profile of BJ McHugh (a record-setting octogenarian runner) and a travel essay about Boulder, Colorado. My lovely friend, Laura Stanley, and I wrote several pieces for CBC Music, including one about musicians who were inspired by Alanis Morissette’s album, “Jagged Little Pill.”
What I Wish I Wrote
As for other writers’ stories that moved, impressed, entertained or consoled me…. god, there were so many. Here are 12 I still think about:
Karl Ove Knausgaard — Travels Through America, New York Times Magazine
It seems like a rambling mess but I dare you to stop reading. This piece led me to read the first four volumes in Knausgaard’s sprawling My Struggle series, and I still can’t quite understand what it is I like about him or his writing. I just hope that after I’ve read thousands of his pages, aspects of his style will somehow seep into my own sentences.
Larissa MacFarquhar — The Children of Strangers, The New Yorker
This story, about a couple that adopted 20 children, experiments with form and dialogue in interesting ways. By pulling out so many quotations and essentially letting the children speak for themselves you get a sense of how chaotic the household became and how the children navigated the chaos in different ways.
Alana Massey — Against Chill, Matter
If you are a young woman who is at all disappointed or disillusioned by men, you can’t read Alana Massey and not come away with at least three sentences suitable for daily repetition. Most of her stories are personal essays but they reveal deeper truths about how men and women behave. A few things we learned from Alana Massey this year: “chill is a garbage virtue that will destroy the species,” “the centuries-long period of dick overvaluation is over,” and “there is no future with a Gwyneth man when you’re a Winona woman, particularly a Winona in a world made for Gwyneths.” Follow her on Twitter (@alanamassey). Look for her forthcoming book. I can’t sing her praises loudly enough.
Lisa Carver — The Life of Sadie, 13, New York Magazine
Susan Orlean’s essay, “The American Male at Age 10” is one of my all-time-favourite essays. This collection of conversations between a mother and her 13-year-old daughter is not trying to be that essay, but it is a charming read that captures an age and will make you laugh.
Sarah Lyall — A Life in Motion, Stopped Cold, New York Times
This is a tragic but beautifully-written story about a Brazilian gymnast, Laís Souza, who became a great aerial skier. Then she has a life-altering accident. It’s shocking and sad but her spirit shines through the piece.
Richard Kelly Kemick — Playing God, The Walrus
Playing God
I sold my wife's clothes to build a Christmas village in my parents' basement
thewalrus.ca
This memoir, about the author’s lifelong compulsion to build an immaculate Christmas village, was one of the funniest and most bizarre essays I read all year. “I can’t remember not wanting a Christmas village,” it begins. This was my favourite paragraph:
“I’ve stopped telling people about my village. Not because I’m ashamed of it. All I have to show for my quarter-century on the planet are two worthless arts degrees, my job as a self-employed dog walker, and a book of poetry destined to sell fewer than twelve copies. My Christmas village — bustling with eighteen buildings, more than sixty people, and countless accessories — is probably the most impressive thing I’ll do with my life. And I’m okay with that.”
The lengths to which the writer goes to improve his village and explain to us commoners why it matters so much… simply incredible.
William Finnegan — Off Diamond Head: To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii, The New Yorker
Many New Yorker writers are so skilled that they can interest me in just about any topic. But only really great writing leads me to buy an entire book on an alien subject. After finishing this essay, I bought and devoured Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan. I bought it a second time, too, to give away for a book club exchange. The writing is so beautifully paced and intimate and the settings in the article (and the book) are fantastic. I felt as if I was surfing through this book; Finnegan describes waves by placing you inside them. This essay gets at issues of race and class, and the book, too, is about a lot more than the sport of surfing. It’s about masculinity, love, sacrifice, and aging.
Mary Norris — Confessions of a Comma Queen, The New Yorker
This was another essay that sent me straight out the door to buy the book. The New Yorker excerpt had one of the best ledes I read all year: “I didn’t set out to be a comma queen.” Full of funny details and grammar tips.
Elizabeth Weil — Mary Cain is Growing Up Fast, New York Times Magazine
This was published before Mary Cain returned from Oregon to train in New York, but it’s nonetheless a great portrait of her, her potential as a world-class distance runner, and the weight of the pressure sitting on her shoulders. It also includes, at the end, a correction which will amuse NYC-area runners: “It is the Wanamaker Mile, not the Winamaker Mile.”
Miranda July — A Very Revealing Conversation With Rihanna, New York Times Style Magazine
I loved this essay because Rihanna’s personality sparkled but didn’t outshine or compete with Miranda July’s. Both women seem equally honest, humble, intelligent, and vulnerable. And Miranda July’s writing is fantastic: Rihanna’s eyes, for example, are “dizzying hazel-green starbursts.”
Brian Burnsed — High Endurance, NCAA Champion Magazine
An incredible story about how an Ethiopian boy, Chernet Sisay, orphaned at age 9, landed on High Point’s cross-country team. The depth of reporting really does the story justice. The author even talked to his physiotherapist, who said, “I think when you have his background, it does one of two things: It either destroys you or it makes an exceptional human being. He’s an exceptional human being.”
Jazmine Hughes — I Bled Through My Pants My First Day Working at ‘The New York Times,’ Lenny
The headline tells you all you need to know —yes, this is a “period drama” that will make you cringe and laugh. I originally read it in Lena Dunham’s newsletter, Lenny, but you can also find it in Elle.
Those were some of the most memorable stories I read in newspapers and magazines this year. I’ll leave you with my favourite songs and books from the past year:
