Writing stole me away from my first love, opera. I went to a small liberal arts school in the middle of idyllic Wisconsin. Students root for the Packers and read Nietzsche. I expected the school to be a sleepy place. But writing had sly, seductive tricks up its sleeve. After joining the newspaper staff in my freshman year of college, I have written about vandalism, drug busts, and potential Blaxploitation parties. Writing for the newspaper showed me that unexpected stories crop up in surprising places.

I had been casually seeing journalism since high school. I was the geeky kid writing articles about the Chess club for the yearbook. I was the brown-nosing editor with the key to the journalism room so I could work late on the literary magazine. I couldn’t go on vacation one summer because I picked journalism camp instead. Still, at that point, opera held my heart.

My interest in journalism grew in college. As an inexperienced reporter, I furiously wrote notes on ketchup stained napkins in the excitement of finding surprising nuances in my story. In those first few articles, the rush in approaching people for quotes and later in seeing the story printed in black and white swept me off my feet. I continued writing and improving, and I even purchased a real notebook and usurped the tape recorder from my voice lessons to record quotes.

I wrote almost weekly for my school newspaper. I loved getting assigned the “meaty” stories or being able to shine some unbiased light on an overlooked side of a story. Even studying abroad in Vienna, I constantly jotted down notes about strange histories of food, bizarre behavior, or European similarities to Midwestern county fairs for later writing. Journalism has gotten into my blood.

I became the newspaper’s news editor third term my sophomore year and this is when I finally dumped opera. There was always a wail that we couldn’t have yet another humanities professor be Professor of the Week. Then a debate often followed about whether the Staff Editorial should be on the new campus center (will it ever be completed?) or on the tenure process (but he’s been here twenty years!). Questions about when-do-you-put-dashes-between-words-?-were thrown about throughout the night and pizza was devoured in ten minutes flat at midnight. The constant energy of the creative process, the swirl of ideas among intelligent people, and the final feeling of accomplishment was what I waited for all week. 

When did you start to love to write?