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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.    

Reading Response for Fifth Week

All the reading for this week was extremely interesting, but Telling True Stories was especially revelatory. It was honestly such an interesting read that I got caught up and read beyond the assigned pages and totally screwed myself in another class. Oh well. It was worth it. As such, I'm going to focus on it in particular.

Honestly, I think this might be one of the most valuable books I've ever purchased. The clear, concise formulas that Franklin presents are already changing the way I approach writing. His readable prose really demystifies the process of constructing a story. There are a lot of insights and truths that seem forehead-slappingly obvious now, but were never clear prior to my reading.

His chapter on outlining is particularly helpful. I don't need my toes to count the number of outlines I have made, because they seemed kind of constricting. In fact, I took perverse pride in my ability to write without one. I see now that this was misguided, mainly because his description of "spaghettieing" hit close to home. My mental outline is usually good enough to prevent a catastrophe, but I do struggle sometimes.

The simplicity of his outline model is marvelous (and much less painful than the "ETR" model), and I can't wait to try it out.


Also, his chapter on structuring stories based on "focuses" is a mind-blow, too. I would have never noticed this, but all good stories pretty much follow the five-part development that he outlines. This should prove enormously helpful in my own writing.

Also, reading about structure made me think of another interesting mdoel for storytellign espoused by Dan Harmon, the guy behind the first three seasons of Community: 

1. A character is in a zone of comfort,
2. But they want something.
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation,
4. Adapt to it,
5. Get what they wanted,
6. Pay a heavy price for it,
7. Then return to their familiar situation,
8. Having changed.

Food for thought. Anyway, I think I'm going to read the entire book, and i would encourage others to do the same, because it's worth it.

Reading Response for 3rd Week

These two pieces provided me with some really useful food for thought in considering my story pitch for the upcoming profile assignment. Specifically, it has me thinking about the various techniques of interviewing.

A lot of interviews/profiles about interesting people wind up being really, really boring, and I think this is mainly the fault of the interviewer/profiler. After all, it's his job to make the subject seem interesting, even if it's not. I've noticed that this happens a lot in the typical celebrity interview. Because he only has only fifteen minutes of the Famous Person's time, the journalist is forced to ask a bunch of  cookie-cutter questions that he prepared ahead of time. The artist, having answered these questions a million times, usually gives the interviewer a bunch of short, sullen responses.

Both Orlean and LeBlanc present alternate models of "profiling" that are far more effective. In reading their articles, I have gleaned the following general tidbits:

1. It is necessary to invest a lot of time in a profile if you want it to be successful. LeBlanc's profile of Trina was three years in the making, and Orlean spent a solid couple weeks with Colin. Spending time with your subject allows the interviewer and subject to grow much more comfortable together, facilitating genuine conversation. LeBlanc presents an extreme example of this, getting intertwined with her subject to the point that she becomes almost like a parental figure to Trina. Furthermore, the more time you spend researching writing, the greater depth you are able to achieve. 

2. Actually have a conversation with the subject. If anything, these two pieces prove the inefficacy of showing up with a list of questions hoping to dictate the pace and length of the interview. I think it's necessary to have an idea of what you want to talk about, but I also think that having a genuine conversation with the subject allows for an interview that goes much deeper while remaining much more organic.

I think Marc Maron does an excellent job of this on the WTF podcast series. He never seems like he's asking questions, but he always gets fascinating stuff out of his subjects.

Case in point: http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_338_-_j_mascis Here, he interviews J Mascis, one of the most legendarily sullen musicians of all time. Maron's conversational style turns J downright garrulous.

I also love Orlean's approach to finding subject matter. I am inspired by the way she finds the fascinating amidst the mundane. Reading her little author's blurb was an eye-opener, and has made me think

Finally, in thinking about interviewing technique, I was reminded of a TED talk that Nardwuar gave. It's pretty ridiculous, but I think it also contains some interesting insights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkSUazeI2nM