Steve and His Little Green Limousines Slideshow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj_KGSQ6MhY&feature=youtu.be

Process Writing for the Thing I Wrote About Little Green Limousine

I'm actually pretty happy with how this piece turned out. I was very nervous because my two of my other story ideas didn't pan out and I was totally floundering. I was running out of time, and I decided to interview Steve because I've known him for awhile. Full disclosure: I'm friends with both of his kids, and I've chatted with him about a wide variety of subjects in the past. I think the piece still managed to be pretty impartial despite all that.

This piece was much easier to write than the other ones (perhaps because I know Steve so well). At times it degenerated into a game of "How Many Times Can Trevor Misspell the Word Limousine?" (answer: too many), but it flowed out pretty smoothly.  In reading the comments, I'm a little disappointed that I didn't articulate my theme in a clearer manner. This piece is about Steve's transformation as a businessman, and I wish I had gotten that transformation across better. Any suggestions in this area would be much appreciated.


I have done some additional reporting since Monday. I interviewed K College's Provost (a repeat customer) and I talked to one of the other drivers, a guy named Dale. Dale has two(!) master's degrees and was a big honcho in the Health Department in Kalamazoo. Fascinating guy. I plan on incorporating the stuff i got from them into my next draft.

Steve and His Little Green Limousines

 980 words
Intended for The Index

            Steve Gibson is a renaissance man whose resume is a mile long: author, podcaster, business owner, digital media freelancer, commercial pilot, and school board member. He’s an intellectual. He’s a free-thinker. He’s a seeker. And now, he’s a limo driver.

But Steve doesn’t drive just any limousine: his are smaller and have a distinctly green hue. Steve owns and operates the Little Green Limousine Company. Steve crunches numbers, books clients, picks them up in a white Prius V, and drives them wherever they need to go: Chicago, Detroit, and pretty much anywhere in between. And they ride in style, too. One might think that the term “luxury hybrid” is an oxymoron, but it’s not; a six-foot tall man can sit comfortably in the back seat with plenty of leg- and head-room to spare. The new-car smell is still there.    

            Steve runs his business from his home in Parchment, Michigan in an office down the stairs and past the water heater. It’s a large rectangular room packed with confusing-looking audio equipment from his podcasting days. Steve’s massive, CEO-appropriate desk sits to the right of the door, next to a bookshelf stuffed with books on atheism and skepticism, two of his favorite topics. He just read a book on traffic engineering. “It was fascinating,” he says. There are papers everywhere.

            Steve has the relaxed-yet-serious bearing of someone who has been self-employed for many years. He sports a shaven head with a few days worth of stubble and a green polo bearing the name of his company. He leans back in a tall black swivel chair, speaking deliberately and taking long pauses to make sure he uses the perfect words.

            Steve grew up in this house, and he moved back in when his parents passed away. Steve also inherited his first business from his parents: the financially troubled C.J. Gibson Office Supply Company. Throughout his twenties, Steve rebranded the company as C.J. Gibson Office Direct and fought his way into the black.

            During this time, Steve probably would have laughed at you if you had told him he would be running an environmentally-friendly limo service. He admits to being “late to the table” in accepting global warming. Furthermore, he had “unwavering faith that human ingenuity could outweigh any of the atrocities we commit against the Earth.” He liked Ayn Rand. He was a free-market, individualist kind of guy.

             But during the nineties, Steve began to recognize his own cognitive dissonance. He read Malcolm Gladwell. He questioned his own biases. Slowly, gradually, his worldview changed and became much more complex. Profit became less and less important. He sold Office Direct in 1998 to pursue more meaningful work.

            That meaningful work would happen at 102 North Riverview Drive, across the street from a weather-beaten Marathon Station. There, he and his then-wife Julie ran People Power Productions, a digital media company dedicated to preserving people’s memories for posterity. They made DVD slideshows of photographs for funerals, graduations, and everything in between. They helped people remember. They brought comfort to my family when my grandmother died. They helped people remember. They had a good run, ten years, from 2000 to 2010 when the growth of technology finally rendered his services obsolete. Steve knew it would happen eventually, but he didn’t particularly care. He liked the work. It was meaningful.

            After People Power Productions packed up and left 102 North Riverview vacant, Steve did some thinking and some freelance work. For two years, he kept a vigilant eye out for needs waiting to be filled. When he realized that there was no concierge service targeted towards senior citizens in Kalamazoo, he smelled opportunity. He did research and found that the market had an open spot for him. “There was nothing available besides Town Cars,” he says. “Business people and seniors didn’t feel like they needed a formal limousine.”

            Opportunity in his sight, Steve purchased his first Little Green Limousine in 2012 with an eye towards reducing carbon footprint and cutting costs. Ironically, Steve has found that the higher mile-per-gallon rating of the Prius doesn’t make that much of a difference: “It saves, literally, a couple of bucks per trip.”

            But Steve isn’t necessarily in it for the money. He says that “once you let go of ego and realize that we’re all interdependent, absolute profit is not the ultimate goal.” He views himself as a servant of other people, and he serves happily. He enjoys his customers, and they enjoy him. Many of them forego the Prius’s XM Radio to talk with Steve because, well, he’s an interesting guy. He brings his wealth of knowledge and immense curiosity to the driver’s seat, and he’s had some fantastic talks with his passengers. He learns from them constantly.

That’s not to say that the Little Green Limousine Company isn’t a profitable endeavor. Steve has a metric ton of graphs and charts stored on his computer that show a sharp increase in business over the last year. He also runs his business with an incredibly low overhead because he does everything himself: the website, the logo, and the promotions are all his handiwork. He keeps things lean, and that keeps prices low. In fact, Steve’s business model is working so well that he just added another Prius to his “fleet,” and he’s had to hire three other drivers on a part-time basis to deal with all his bookings, although he still does about eighty percent of the driving.

Steve says he chose to use Priuses because they represent a “more sensitive and practical choice in terms of global impact.” But Steve’s sensitivity and practicality are having a local impact, too; a little over fifty percent of his business comes from repeat customers. People enjoy riding in the Little Green Limousines, and Steve enjoys his customers. For a businessman interested in making a difference as well as a profit, this is success.

My Show and Tell: "Can I get in the Van?" by Erick Lyle

 http://www.vice.com/read/can-i-get-in-the-van-000288-v20n4

This is easily my favorite piece of journalism that I've read in the past few months. Basically, the writer is assigned to write a piece on the two reunited versions of the famed punk rock/experimental/psychedelic band Black Flag. The writer, a musician, hears that Black Flag is auditioning bassists and decides to hitchhike his way across the country to Texas where the auditions are held. He melts the faces of the guys in the band, and he practices with them for a week. They offer him a spot in the band. He turns them down and goes back to New York, bass in hand.

I think this is such a fascinating piece because the writer put himself completely into the story. He showed a Hunter S. Thompson-esque disregard for his original assignment (write about a reunited band) and decided to dive into the story completely. In doing so, he is able to provide a perspective no other journalist will ever get: one from inside the band. We can see the criteria guitar player Greg Ginn has in mind for players (Do you smoke weed?") and it gives the reader an amazing insight into the musical process of how this band jams, man. Furthermore, it's fascinating from a narrative standpoint. It's a damn good story.

It also raises some interesting questions. Did Erick Lyle violate journalistic ethics? Is there too much of him in the piece? Does his involvement render the piece ineffective. I don't think so, but I'd like to hear other opinions.

The Church in the Basement

1,828 Words 

Kalamazoo Gazette Faith Section

The Church in the Basement

            About a quarter of a mile down Winchell Avenue, there is a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Inside the door, there is a grandfatherly greeter named Richard handing out bulletins and hugs. To the right of the foyer, there is an imposing sanctuary with rows of hard wooden pews and another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. The sanctuary is completely empty, and this often confuses first-time visitors, until they are directed downstairs by Richard.

            Travelling down the two flights of stairs reveals a basement lit by fluorescent lights where thirty or so gray-haired men and women are milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard plays guitar, fingerpicking his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. There are plenty of battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, flanked on both sides by large white banners painted in a wide array of colors with people, rainbows and all manners of LGBTQ pride symbols. At the center of this explosion of color is a table covered with a pristine white cloth holding two candles with a tasteful bronze cross in the center. Off to the side, there is a miniature statue of a rainbow-colored phoenix rising from the flames.

            There’s a man behind the altar, about fifty, bald, with glasses. He’s clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with custom gay pride symbols.

            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are between fifty and seventy, and they are a delightful cast of characters.

            On the left side of this semicircle of chairs is Marvel, a retired woman after left behind her Bible Baptist upbringing because she “hated getting in trouble for thinking” and came to Phoenix twenty-five years ago.

            Mark is sitting behind Marvel. Mark is a gay man in his forties and a former Catholic who left the church in disgust one Sunday after the priest gave a gay-bashing sermon from the book of Leviticus. The experience soured him on faith, and he considers himself an agnostic now, but that hasn’t stopped him from coming to Phoenix for twenty years. He still sings hymns and asks for prayers during the service despite his agnosticism.

           Myrna walks in five minutes before the service begins. Myrna is an older woman in her seventies with laugh lines that testify to her readiness to smile. She came here years ago to learn more about gay people, and, in the process, learned that she was a lesbian herself when she fell in love with another member of the congregation.  

            At six o’clock every Sunday night, they meet in this basement, a space they rent from the Kalamazoo Church of Disciples, a faith community brave enough and liberal enough to accept Phoenix’s community with open arms. No one seems to mind meeting in the basement; after all, a basement beats a closet every time.

            Besides, basements are nothing new to Phoenix’s parishioners. In fact, they started out in a basement. On Ash Wednesday in February of 1988, eighteen people met in Pastor Cyril Stevenson’s basement for Phoenix’s inaugural service. Cyril had been dismissed from the United Church of Christ for being gay, and he decided to start Phoenix with co-Pastor Melanie Morrison in order to provide a safe place for LGBTQ men and women to worship. For a long time, theirs was the only church that accepted LGBTQ people.

            After that initial meeting, the church bounced from basement to rented room to basement, staying on the margins of the faith community until acceptance began to prevail in the mid-nineties, and Phoenix was accepted back into the United Church of Christ after a long process of accreditation. After the leadership of other UCC churches in the area examined Phoenix under a microscope, there was a vote, and Phoenix was welcomed back into the fold with open arms.    

            Despite finding a degree of acceptance, they continued to stay in rented spaces for financial reasons. Small churches always live on the edge when it comes to making rent and paying salaries, and Phoenix is no exception. Even at their height of membership, the community never numbered more than sixty, so it was always a struggle to make rent. Inevitably, disputes over money began to arise, and a gulf that was too wide to be bridged grew between two groups within the church. In 2007, a third of the congregation left to form another church.

            But it’s a difficult to kill a phoenix, and the church clung to life, continuing to provide community to those who had been ostracized for the sexual orientation. One person who sought out that community was current Pastor, Ken Arthur. Ken left his faith behind when he went to college because he was unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the idea of hellfire and damnation. After coming out at age thirty, he came to Phoenix in 1996 seeking a support system to aid him in his self-discovery. Over the course of four or five years, Ken’s skepticism gradually melted away, and he came to affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ.

            To further explore his newfound spirituality, Ken decided to enroll in the Chicago Theological Seminary in 2007. While he was there, he received a Master’s in Religious Studies rather than a Divinity degree, because he “definitely didn’t want to be a pastor.”

Within a year, Ken became Phoenix’s pastor.  Because of the split, Phoenix needed an interim pastor, and Ken was asked to step because of his time at the Seminary. His congregation liked him so much that they made him the full-time pastor in 2010. Because Ken was a member for so long, there isn’t much of a hierarchy between pastor and flock. The congregants are quick to mention this, often excitedly. “Feel free to talk to Ken. He was one of us for a long time.” There are no divisions here. He might be the head, but he is still a part of the body.  

            Because of this, Ken doesn’t appear perturbed when the clock reads 6:00 and people are still chatting and making their rounds. He waits patiently, going over notes until people find their seats. When things settle down, he motions to Frank, an elderly gentleman wearing a conservative blue dress shirt, and Frank uses a candle at the end of a long golden handle to light the candles on the altar, signifying that it is time to begin.

            The service begins with a call to worship based on Psalm 148. Pastor Ken exhorts his congregation to “Praise the Great Spirit from the Heavens” and they respond “Praise the Holy One from the skies above.”

            It’s the Sunday after Arbor Day, so Ken invites Jim up to read the poem “Let the trees be consulted” by John Wright. Jim, a former paramedic in his forties, reads beautifully. With passion evident in his voice, he recites “Let lumber be treasured like gold/let chainsaws be played like saxophones,” setting the tone for the environmentally-focused service. Everyone raises their voice to sing a few hymns that celebrate the divine beauty of nature.  

            After a few songs, the hymnals are set on the floor and the members of the congregation share their joys and concerns for the week. This week, the joys outnumber the concerns. There is celebration of retirement, of children being born, and flowers budding. Though there are fewer concerns, they are heavy. The piano player, Linda, had to kick her alcoholic brother out of her house because he recently fell off the wagon. People are hurting and dying, and the members of Phoenix share their grief freely with one another. There is no filter, no effort to put up a front and disguise hurt here. As Myrna later puts it, “The prayers are so much more real here.”

            Once the sharing ends, the prayers commence. Everyone closes their eyes and joins hands, giving thanks to God for their joys and entreating God for help with their sorrows. This prayer can last for a hand-crampingly long time, but no one minds. Cramped hands are just a side-effect of caring.

            Once every joy and concern has been addressed, the Phoenicians recite a gender-neutral adaptation of the Disciples Prayer. Their voices are strong, though people read at different speeds, giving the prayer an off-kilter feel.

            Ken calls up Katy and Mona to sing a song, and they give a spirited rendition of the Indigo Girls tune “A Hammer and a Nail,” accompanied by Jonathan, the guitarist. Such rapid switchbacks between religious and secular happen often at Phoenix, often rapidly enough to give an unaccustomed visitor whiplash.

            As the last note dies out, Ken walks up to begin his message. Ken doesn’t have the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification because the soundboard has been acting up lately. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The quiet passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly.

            In fact, overflowing is the subject of Ken’s message. He reads from the Book of John, emphasizing Jesus’s call for his disciples to “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Let love overflow. Work to realize the Kingdom of God here on Earth. Work for peace and hope and justice. It is stirring. People are moved, in spirit as well as body: a construction paper poster with a crude tree glued on it boasts 254 hours of community service, 11 trees planted, and 4 letters written as a part of the church’s Arbor Day campaign for environmental stewardship. This is a place of dirty fingernails and grass stains.

            Ken closes his remarks, and Frank extinguishes the flame on the altar candles as everyone sings one more song, a hymn penned by a former member that reminds the members of Phoenix to be the light in the world even as the ceremony ends.

            Ken gives his benediction, and everyone passes the peace. There are no awkward handshakes and mumbled peaceofChristbewithyous here; only hugs and conversation. People linger a little, chatting for twenty or thirty minutes until it’s time trickle out, ascending the steps out of the basement back into the world.    

The Events of October Reading Response

This book was fascinating to me both as a reader and as someone looking to perfect their craft.  I found myself unable to put The Events of October down and I read it in two marathon sessions even though I was a little sick to my stomach. It's pretty easy to alienate the reader when writing about something as awful as a murder-suicide, but Gail managed to tell the story in a manner that demanded my attention. Perhaps this is because the voice of the book is so passionate that it practically forces the reader to pay attention.

One reason I found this book so compelling is it's Middlemarch-like qualities. Gail gives George Eliot/Marian Evans a shout-out early-on, and her influence is pretty easy to see. Kalamazoo College is a lot like the town Middlemarch, in a way: it's a small, cloistered community where everyone knows everyone. And, like Middlemarch, The Events of October is chiefly concerned with the idea of community as a group that changes through constant interaction.

Furthermore, both books are careful to depict the members of their respective communities with great sympathy. Just as Eliot dives into the motives of every character in order to present them in a sympathetic light, Gail eschews judgment in favor of understanding, preferring to explain each subject's motivations. For instance, it would have been very easy to demonize Neenef's friends for their insistence upon a memorial for Neenef. However, the narration makes it clear that this is simply a natural by-product of their grief and trauma. Similarly, it would be easy to ridicule those who preferred to think of the murder-suicide as an isolated incident rather than a femicide indicative of a greater trend of male violence. Instead, Gail tells the reader that compartmentalizing such a traumatic event makes coping easier. Thus, we do not judge these people, even their viewpoint is somewhat pernicious.

This level of sympathy and empathy is quite impressive, and it's indicative of an immense amount of time spent getting to know subjects. We get the sense that the author really knows these people; thus, all of her assertions about motives seem completely valid because they stem from such a deep understanding of the subject. This is a journalistic standard to live up to.

I also thought of Nicholas Lemann's piece in Telling True Stories regarding the "idea track" of a piece of nonfiction. This book's idea track is apparent throughout, and there are lots of excellent "marriage moments." It really serves as a model for lining ideas up with experience.

Long-overdue reading response to Telling True Stories That Was Supposed to be Done 7th Week

Better late than never? Right?

As usual, Telling True Stories proved to be an illuminating read. There were a lot of little "a-ha" moments interspersed throughout the text that were unique to their authors. But, I noticed one common theme popping up: the use of cinematic metaphors to describe good nonfiction writing. Whether explicit (like Ephron's "What Journalists Can Learn from Screenwriters") or using a phrase like "he also pulls the camera back, away from the tight shots of the road grader," they seem to permeate the discourse on narrative journalism.

Of course, this makes sense in the context of 20th- and 21st-century literature, as Adam Hochschild shows in his contrast between Middlemarch and The Great Gastby. Literature has become rooted in concrete images rather than reflection. This forces me to ask myself some unpleasant questions: do I focus too much on reflection? Is this what's bogging down my profile?

I tend to mix reflection and scene pretty evenly, which is great for personal essays but maybe not the best idea for writing journalism. Point taken: I need to focus more on scene and allow my journalistic endeavors to become more cinematic while maintaining some of my trademark reflection. 

I was amazed at the way Hochschild rendered his scene in the printer's shop so artfully and vividly despite the seemingly-small amount of information available. Also, Louise Kiernan's paragraph about broken glass that required two professors and an expert speaks to the depth of research that is necessary for effective reporting. Clearly, I need to step up my research game as well.

Once again, sorry this is so late.

Profile edit

1,148 words

The Church in the Basement

            South beyond Stadium Drive, past rows and rows of suburban homes with immaculate lawns, Oakland Drive makes a T with Winchell Avenue. About a quarter of a mile down Winchell, there is a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Inside the door, there is a grandfatherly greeter named Richard handing out bulletins and hugs. To the right of the foyer, there is an imposing sanctuary with rows of hard wooden pews and another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. The sanctuary is completely empty, and this often confuses first-time visitors, until they are directed downstairs by Richard.

Travelling down the two flights of stairs reveals a basement lit by fluorescent lights where thirty or so gray-haired men and women are milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard plays guitar, fingerpicking his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. There are plenty of battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, flanked on both sides by large white banners painted in a wide array of colors with people, rainbows and all manners of LGBTQ pride symbols. At the center of this explosion of color is a table covered with a pristine white cloth holding two candles with a tasteful bronze cross in the center. Off to the side, there is a miniature statue of a rainbow-colored phoenix rising from the flames.

There’s a man behind the altar, about fifty, bald, with glasses. He’s clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with custom gay pride symbols.
            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are between fifty and seventy, and they are a delightful cast of characters. There’s Marvel, a retired woman after left behind her Bible Baptist upbringing because she “hated getting in trouble for thinking” and came to Phoenix twenty-five years ago.

And there’s Mark, a gay man in his forties and a former Catholic who left the church in disgust one Sunday after the priest gave a gay-bashing sermon from the book of Leviticus. The experience soured him on faith, and he considers himself an agnostic now, but he’s been coming to Phoenix for twenty years, singing hymns and enjoying the community.

            Then there’s Myrna, an older woman in her seventies with laugh lines that testify to her readiness to smile. She came here years ago to learn more about gay people, and, in the process, learned that she was a lesbian when she fell in love with another member.

 At six o’clock every Sunday night, they meet in this basement, a space they rent from the Kalamazoo Church of Disciples, a faith community brave enough and liberal enough to accept Phoenix’s community with open arms. No one seems to mind meeting in the basement; after all, a basement beats a closet every time.

Besides, basements are nothing new to Phoenix’s parishioners. In fact, they started out in a basement. On Ash Wednesday of 1988, eighteen people met in Pastor Cyril Stevenson’s basement for Phoenix’s inaugural service. Cyril had been dismissed from the United Church of Christ for being gay, and he decided to start Phoenix with co-Pastor Melanie Morrison in order to provide a safe place for LGBTQ men and women to worship. For a long time, theirs was the only church that accepted people of different sexualities. 

After that initial meeting, the church bounced from basement to rented room to basement, staying on the margins of the faith community until acceptance began to prevail in the mid-nineties, and Phoenix was accepted back into the United Church of Christ.

Despite finding a degree of acceptance, they continued to stay in rented spaces for financial reasons. Small churches always live on the edge when it comes to making rent and paying salaries, and Phoenix is no exception. Even at their height of membership, the community never numbered more than sixty, so it was always a struggle to make rent. Inevitably, disputes over money began to arise, and a gulf that was too wide to be bridged grew between two groups within the church. In 2007, a third of the congregation left to from another church.

But it’s a difficult to kill a phoenix, and the church clung to life, continuing to provide community to those who had been ostracized for the sexual orientation. One person who sought out that community was current Pastor, Ken Arthur. Ken left the church when he went to college because he was unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the idea of hellfire and damnation. After coming out at age thirty, he came to Phoenix in 1996 seeking a support system to aid him in his self-discovery. Over the course of four or five years, Ken’s skepticism gradually melted away, and he came to affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ.

To further explore his newfound spirituality, Ken decided to enroll in the Chicago Theological Seminary in 2007. While he was there, he received a Master’s in Religious Studies rather than a Divinity degree, because he “definitely didn’t want to be a pastor.”

Within a year, Ken became Phoenix’s pastor.  Because of the split, Phoenix needed an interim pastor, and Ken was asked to step because of his time at the Seminary. His congregation liked him so much that they made him the full-time pastor in 2010.

Ken promotes a brand of theology that rejects easy answers and “simple-minded, warm-and-fuzzy peace.” He welcomes questions and uncertainties. When asked about the specifics of the afterlife, he shrugs and says, “Who knows?” “When I talk about the Kingdom, I’m talking about realizing it here: working for peace and hope and justice here on Earth.” And they do indeed do work. A construction paper poster boasts 254 hours of community service, 11 trees planted, and 4 letters written as a part of the church’s Arbor Day campaign for environmental stewardship.  

And Ken doesn’t do talk about the Kingdom in the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly, as he preaches, love, justice, and reconciliation in the basement of a church.

I Think I Might Have Really Shit the Bed on This One: Week Six Process Writing

This assignment was rough. I haven't written anything that could be considered "journalism" since my days as the editor of my middle school newspaper, and it's safe to say that I'm a little rusty. Lots of questions question kept popping up  throughout the process of writing, such as:

1. "How do I do journalism?"
I've never done a profile before. It shows. Obviously, I'm going to totally blow the first few times. It's part of the learning process. That knowledge doesn't make it any less distressing to end up with a profile I'm not entirely satisfied with--especially since it concerns subjects that matter a great deal to me.

2. "What the hell was I thinking when I interviewed my subject?"
As I was writing, I found myself wishing for information that I didn't have. I spent a solid block of time interviewing my subject, but I still found myself wishing I had asked more questions or pressed more in certain areas. Again, I'm guessing that knowing what questions to ask is another skill learned through trial-and-error. I have to learn how to anticipate the information I'll need while interviewing. If I'd had time to do a follow-up interview, I think this piece would have been a lot better. Because I had a false start on another subject, I was kind of pressed for time and I did the best I could.

3.  "How do I do words good?"
This came after asking the above questions too many times.

4. "asdfjaskdjfasdfjkasdjfklasjdfklmcsdfjklsdjfkl?"
This question came up after trying to do words good for several hours.

5. (uncontrollable sobbing)

In terms of the actual content, I think there are two main flaws. The most critical is that the focus of the piece seems hazy. I couldn't decide whether to focus on the church or the pastor, and I kind of did both. I'm not sure if it works at all because of this. Also, I'm afraid the piece lacks concrete detail and that it reads like a list of things that happened rather than an actual story.

Of course, I'm very self-critical. Only time  will tell if it was a caffeine-fueled misadventure or a decent start. At any rate, I'm glad that I'm going to have a shot at revising it and I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's feedback in workshop on Wednesday.  

The Pastor in the Basement

1,095 Words
Target publication: Some religious magazine


           Drive South down Oakland Drive past rows and rows of suburban homes with immaculate lawns, and then take a right down Winchell Avenue. Keep going for about a quarter of a mile until you see a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Open the door and accept a bulletin and a hug from the grandfatherly greeter. Look to the right at the empty, imposing sanctuary, with another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. Walk towards the sanctuary, only to be directed to the stairs on the left by the smiling greeter. Step into the basement lit by fluorescent lights, take a drink from the white water fountain and see the thirty or so gray-haired men and women milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard fingerpicks his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. Take a seat in one of the battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, and look at the man standing behind the communion table.

            He’s about fifty, bald, with glasses, clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with various gay-pride symbols.

            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church, a small United Church of Christ congregation that rents out the basement of the larger Disciples of Christ church upstairs. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are in their fifties or sixties, and they wear their identities proudly: their church’s symbol is a rainbow-colored phoenix rising up from the flames against the backdrop of the LGBTQ symbol. The church switches between the traditional and the nontraditional at breakneck speed. On any given Sunday, an Indigo Girls song might follow a traditional hymn or a reading of one of Whitman’s poems might follow the recitation of The Disciples’ Prayer. The one constant is Pastor Ken, the mastermind, the glue that holds the whole post-postmodern religious collage together.

            Ken never planned on becoming a pastor, even though he grew up attending church in his hometown of Anderson, Indiana. The church was quite rigid and conservative, though Ken remembers thinking it was liberal “because they let us go to the movies and play cards.” He distills the general mindset of the church thusly: “God is nice if you believe, and if you don’t, you go to hell.” This image of God as an angry father troubled Ken, and, unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the existence of hell, he dropped out of church and left his faith behind when he came to Kalamazoo College in 1984.

            After getting his bachelor’s degree in math from Kalamazoo and a master’s in Computer Science, Ken began working as a freelance computer programmer.  During his twenties, Ken says he was an agnostic, though he frequently picked up spiritual texts such as The Dao of Pooh, a book that is still jammed in his office bookshelf with scores of other texts about religion and philosophy.

            But that all changed in 1996 when Ken turned thirty. As Ken puts it, “I was thirty when I started dealing with being gay.” Ironically, Ken wound up coming back to church as part of the coming-out process. He heard that Phoenix Community was a church with a gay pastor, and he visited hoping to “meet more gay people in a safe environment.” Attending Phoenix, along doing affirmation exercises that made him “feel like Stuart Smalley,” helped Ken come to terms with his identity as a gay man. Ken kept coming on Sundays, and within two years became a full-fledged member of the church.            

            But despite his regular Church attendance, Ken remained a skeptic for several more years. Eventually, though, he wavered from his agnosticism and fell back into faith. Ken says that rediscovering faith was a slow, gradual process. His one “A-ha!” moment came when the pastor at Phoenix led the congregation in a decidedly non-Christian spiritual practice: shamanic journeying. Essentially, shamanic journeying is a distillation of shamanic traditions from man varied cultures. By listening to a repetitive tribal drumbeat, would-be journeyers are able to enter a trance-like altered state that allows them to tap into the collective unconscious. Ken relates shamanic journeying to Jungian psychology, saying that it is a way of “dreaming symbolic meanings from a divine power.” The experience opened him up to the more intuitive, visceral aspects of faith. Eventually, Ken began to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

            Shortly after rediscovering his spirituality, Ken decided to pull up stakes and attend the Chicago Theological Seminary. While studying in the windy city, Ken decided that he “definitely didn’t want to be a minister” and opted to get a M.A. in Religious studies rather than the ministerial Master’s of Divinity.

            Shortly thereafter, Ken would, in fact, become a minister. When he returned, he found Phoenix in turmoil. Money, always a problem for small churches like Phoenix, had caused a great deal of discord among the congregation, and “enough people hurt enough other people” that one-third of the church left along with the pastor. Because of his background in the seminary, Ken was asked to fill in as an interim minister. However, as the interim period dragged on, he seemed more and more like the best candidate, and became Phoenix Community’s official pastor in 2010.

             As pastor, Ken promotes a brand of theology that rejects easy answers and “simple-minded, warm-and-fuzzy peace.” He welcomes questions and uncertainties. When asked about the specifics of the afterlife, he shrugs and says, “Who knows?” “When I talk about the Kingdom, I’m talking about realizing it here: working for peace and hope and justice here on Earth.”

            And Ken doesn’t do talk about the Kingdom in the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly, as he preaches, love, justice, and reconciliation in the basement of a church.

Reading Response for Firth Week (for real, this time)

I apologize for the lateness of this response. I was like "No class today? I'll immediately forget about all assignments!"

Telling True Stories turned out to be a fountain of valuable advice. In fact, there was so much information that I felt somewhat like a cracker on the business end of a sandblaster. Every author has so many little "tricks" and piercingly insightful points that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Often, the various authors are in conflict with one another, ie:

"Use a tape recorder!"
"Don't use a tape recorder!"

"Become broskis with the subject!"
"Remain as aloof and mysterious as you possibly can!"

This problem is compounded by the fact that all the authors make their points in a compelling way. Over the course of the reading, I found myself nodding with one author, then swinging to another point of view a few pages later. Who do I believe?

Ordinarily, this would be maddening. However, instead of reacting by screaming "NOOOOOOOOO!" at my book until I cry (like I normally do), I was instead overcome with a strange sense of peace. If I've learned anything about journalism from this book, it's that there are a multitude of ways to report and interview correctly. Two different reporters with different styles can interview the same person and write totally different pieces that are equally successful. No particular style is "right" or "wrong;" it's largely up to the individual.

Of course this isn't to suggest that you can just do whatever and be fine, because you're just "doing you," as the kids say. Even though each person's method of approaching their craft is different, they still have to work to perfect that craft, and be open to other methods of doing things. 

Questions of discussion: Am I right in the assertion I made above? If so, what is your style as an interviewer/reporter?

The Avocado Anxiety-Management Method

            I had the worst anxiety attack of my life at a poetry reading. I was sitting near the back in an attempt to conceal the fact that I was alone. Generally speaking, being alone in public freaks me out, but t hat feeling is nothing new. It’s garden-variety anxiety, so to speak. I was fine until a pretty artsy girl came in late and sat down in the chair directly to my right (Next to me! When there were like thirty other seats for her to choose from!).

            Pretty artsy girls absolutely fry my motherboard.

             Now, occasionally, people in life-or-death situations speak of time slowing to a crawl. Extreme amounts of adrenaline can cause one’s perceptions to become so keen that everything seems to move incredibly slowly in relation to a racing mind. I shit you not, this happened to me within seconds of Pretty Artsy Girl’s decision to sit next to me. Like sprinter coming out of the blocks, uninvited adrenaline rudely coursed through my veins, and the rest of the reading unfolded in bullet-time. The poet (an older woman with white hair and a pleasant, grandmotherly tone) suddenly sounded like James Earl Jones, with each poem resembling a guttural heavy metal 45 being played at 33 1/3 rpms. I spent the remainder of the reading sitting bolt upright and staring unblinkingly at the front of the room, breathing in deeply through my nose and exhaling through my mouth as quietly and slowly as humanly possible. 

            It is truly a mystery why I have difficulty meeting women.

            The second the poet finished her last poem, I speed-walked to the door, made haste for my car, and drove home at a mildly-unsafe speed. I finally stopped sweating and began breathing normally once the door was safely closed behind me.

            Social anxiety is helluva drug, and I am constantly tripping balls. Unlike most people, who are able to feel “at-ease” or “okay” or “chillaxed,” I am constantly in fight-or-flight mode. My neurons are always on pins and needles, ready to go to DEFCON-1 at a moment’s notice. I’ve been dealing with it ever since the first day of sixth grade, when, confronted with a teeming mass of faces I didn’t recognized, I ducked into a bathroom to take an unnecessary piss. I sought solitude in this manner so often that one day my English teacher asked me in front of the entire class if I had a bladder infection.

            Thankfully, I got more skillful at dealing with my rogue nervous system as time passed, mainly by dint of sheer repetition. The cerebellum, wonderfully adaptable mass of noodles that it is, is always trying to troubleshoot itself. Unbeknownst to me, my subconscious was toiling away deep within the bowels of my brain, wearing a white lab coat and observing every interaction while making notes on a clipboard. High school presented lots of opportunities for trial-and-error, and, by virtue of being jammed together with the same people for eight years, I was able to develop oodles and oodles of neurological algorithms that helped me control my anxiety. Weirdly enough, I even became rather popular. By the time I graduated, I had high school figured out.

            But, as I hunted for a summer job, I quickly realized that life, at the height of its rudeness, would often place me in situations without giving me eight years to get comfortable. My course of action was clear: subscribe to Netflix, purchase several dozen cats, program Jimmy John’s into my speed dial, and become a hermit.

            Unfortunately, this plan didn’t pan out because, as a human, I am hard-wired to seek out other humans. Living in community is nice, even if it’s terrifying. So, I was forced to engage in one of the most singularly unpleasant, nasty tasks known to man: coping. There are many ways to cope with anxiety. Some well-established pathways to peace-of-mind include meditation, medication, and the old stand-by, drinking heavily. However, I eschewed these tried-true-methods and confronted my anxiety using the most ancient, revered method of them all: by making enough guacamole to choke a herd of medium-sized elephants.

            I didn’t consciously set out to achieve enlightenment through guacamole-production. It just…happened. After graduation, several of my best friends began working at an overpriced tapas restaurant called Casa Bolero. At Casa Bolero, enough idiots were willing to pay $8.95 for table-side guacamole that the waitresses were unable to keep up with demand. My friends were promoted from dishwashers to guacamole-makers. After they put in a good word for me, I sat through a one-question interview (“When can you start?”) and became an official Guac Boy. That was my official, 100% real, honest-to-goodness job title that I put on my tax return.

            On my first day, I showed up wearing black pants, black shoes, a black shirt, and an expectant smile. Within an hour of guac-making, I regretted my decision to not become a hermit. Making guacamole is second only to landmine-diffusion in a contest of being the most nerve-wracking thing ever. It seems relatively simple: load a tray with ingredients, carry it out to the customer, guac the customer’s world, and then head back to the kaleidoscope of colorful square plates, white chef shirts and carefully plated Spain-ish food in the kitchen. 

            But things, in general, are not easy. Simply getting to the customer was a nerve-fraying experience. I have remarkably poor motor skills, so I was never able to get the hang of carrying the heavy trays. The dining room was also very cramped, and it was always a challenge to navigate the maelstrom of customers, chairs, and little children. I never dropped a tray, but I also never stopped feeling like a complete guacatastrophe was one misstep away. Also, numbers confuse me and I have the memory of a goldfish, so it was a complete crapshoot as to whether or not I would make it to the correct table. A word to the wise: there are few things more awkward than attempting to make guacamole for people who do not want guacamole.

            In fact, the only thing that’s more awkward is making guacamole for people who do want guacamole. This is because it takes about five minutes to make a proper batch. Minus the initial pleasantries, that left me with four and a half minutes to fill. Four and a half minutes may not seem like a long time to someone, but for someone that finds basic social interaction baffling, it can be an eternity. Needless to say, things weren’t pretty for awhile.

            I floundered. After initially greeting the table, I would throw out a barrage of questions (“How are you doing? Some weather, huh? Weather is good! How ‘bout sports teams? I like sports! Do you like guacamole?”). No matter how many different conversational tacks I took, I could never fill the whole five minutes.  The end result was always the same: me furiously mashing avocadoes under a deathly silence punctuated only by small bits of pulp squirting up and landing on my pants and shirt.

            After a few weeks of flop-sweat, I couldn’t take it anymore and decided to develop a shtick to use on unresponsive customers. I looked up a bunch of Fun Facts about guacamole and avocadoes on the internet and began rattle them off to customers. I decided that this was a pretty funny idea, and decided to take it a step further, adopting the persona of crazed tour-guide/guacamole-evangelist, enthusiastically educating my customers about the health benefits of avocadoes while giving them my personal testimony about how the Power of Avocadoes had changed my life forever:

            “Let me tell you folks a story: one evening, I was sitting there in this restaurant, just like you. I ordered the guacamole and it was just incredible. I applied to work here the next day, and I haven’t looked back since. I love my job. Nothing makes me happier than making other people happy with my guacamole. It’s the best damn food on the planet, that’s what I think. Some people in the food service industry get sick of food when they deal with it every day, but not me, no sir! Just between you and me, I sneak a few bites when I’m on break. And it’s good for you, too! Did you know that avocadoes are high in B, E, and K vitamins? They also have lots of good lipids and fats! There’s a lot of stigma in modern society about fats, but your body needs ‘em, and avocadoes got ‘em! They’re the ultimate superfood, Mother Nature’s gift to mankind, I tell ya!”

            Usually, the customers were so taken aback by my seemingly coked-up zeal that they actually interacted with me, albeit at arm’s length because I seemed dangerously unhinged. It was also nice to see people shift uncomfortably in their chairs as I battered them with my stream of chatter. As someone who is constantly uncomfortable, I take evil delight out of making other people feel as awkward and out-of-place as me. It’s always nice to level the playing field a little bit. 

            As hilarious as people’s reactions were, it became exhausting to wear such a hyperactive persona. Also, weirding out customers is not the best strategy for amassing tips. So, as I grew more comfortable and gave progressively fewer and fewer shits, I developed a new, cartoonishly douchey and arrogant character. After greeting the customer, I would say things like “Not to brag or anything, but I’m basically the Michael Jordan of guacamole making, if Michael Jordan was five times better at basketball and ten times as good-looking.” From there I would continue to up the ante, bragging about everything from my ability to eat jalapenos to my own humbleness. I would close with lines like “I hope this guacamole is as good-tasting as I am good-looking,” then throw out a guacamole-related pun over my shoulder I picked up my tray to leave. My favorite was “Have a good night, and rock out with your guac out.”

            I also referred to myself in the third person as Christopher Guacken.

            To my surprise, most customers thought this was hilarious, and I received far more money in tips than ever before. Valuable life lesson learned: act like a huge douchebag and people will reward you with money and adoration. 

            I also found out that older women find nothing sexier than a confident guacamole boy after they’ve had several shots of tequila. Some confined this to a few subtle flirtatious comments, but others were more overt. One fifty year-old woman trying to pass for thirty told me “I don’t want garlic in mine. I love garlic, but don’t put any garlic in there, ‘cause I’m gonna make out with someone tonight and I don’t wanna have garlic breath.” 

            “Very well, no garlic, ma’am.”

            She downed a shot of expensive tequila. “Would…you make out with someone who had garlic breath?”

            Without really thinking it through, I decided it would be funny to answer honestly. “Yes, that would be incredibly hot.” What can I say? I love garlic.

            Realizing what I had just done, I whipped up her guac at warp speed while looking at my shoes, then fairly sprinted back to the relative safety of the kitchen and informed the head chef that I was going to step outside because I needed some air.      

            Once the mortification began to fade, I began to notice an unfamiliar emotion swelling faintly in my chest. Triumph? The significance of what I had just done dawned began to dawn on me, and I began to grin like an idiot into the humid August night. Given my history, accidentally hitting on a tequila-addled, garlic-loving cougar seemed like the equivalent of Ahab actually catching his white male. For a brief moment, I couldn’t have felt cooler if I was riding off into the night on a Harley with a leather jacket on while smoking a cigarette and blasting ZZ Top.

            So when a waitress opened the door and screamed “GUAC BOY! I NEED A GUAC ON TABLE 71,” my sense of crushing dread was lessened, diluted by a small measure of something else. Hope? Weird. It was only nine o’clock, and I usually didn’t start hoping until half an hour to closing time. There were five tickets waiting for me in the kitchen, five more trials in a seemingly-endless series of experiments. A faint glimmer of a grin caught the edge of my mouth, looking a little bit like a line graph on the rise.