My mom cried when I quit Arthur Andersen. It was still a prestigious company, I was making a good salary--more than she ever dreamed of--and I was way too old to embark on a new career at 35. Especially in writing. Earning a living appeared implausible, writing novels that would still be read in a hundred years, ridiculous. I knew that. I wanted to try anyway, but I understood the money would run out in a few years, I would return to a miserable job and die miserable.
And it did start out rather bumpy and unpromising. It's still bumpy and unlucrative, but there is promise. And it really is those faint glimmers of encouragement that keep driving me onward. I'd be a basket case without them. I'd be a businessman again.
Here's why. Here's the catch-22 about writing, at least for fundamentally insecure writers like me: The trick isn't so much finding your voice as finding the courage to speak in it. More courage than you'd think. The kind that can only come from the success I would never find without it. I didn't know that at the time, I just knew my voice insisted on betraying me by eluding me.
Nineteen ninety-nine was the year I found the confidence to really embrace my voice, and four people played a leading role in acquiring it. Yesterday, one of them died.
I saw the picture first. I ventured out of my cave into the hallway a few minutes ago, dragged in the Denver Post, slid it of the bright orange slipcover, and there was the slightly-awkward
smile of Editorial Page Editor Sue O'Brien. On the front page--must be a big promotion for her. I was smiling too. Then I spotted the gray text beside her name listing the years. Oh.
I first met Sue by email, in February 1999, just as I was beginning to weasel my way back into print. I had had only one piece published since the early 80s, in a small leftie rag out of Chicago called In These Times. I was still trying to decide whether I should erupt onto the scene in an op-ed column or a pop culture column when Sue announced Colorado Voices, a thirteen-week guest slot for unknown writers on the Post editorial page. Perfect.
I applied, she rejected, but with the nicest personal message, despite hundreds of entries (over a thousand, if I remember). Two months later, Columbine struck, I lucked into covering it for Salon, and emailed Sue the first story I was really proud of, a 4,000-word piece on Evangelical Christians in the area. I was just trying to impress her for some future slot on her op-ed page. She emailed back an hour later asking to buy it--and gently chastising me for not including a phone number on professional correspondence.
The piece had to be trimmed down to fit her 3,000-word slot, and she gave me complete freedom on where to cut, but hands-on help when I struggled to accomplish it. When I came down to the office to deliver my photo, she was slightly frantic on a deadline crunch, but took me around to meet all the edit-page staff anyway. She gave me the nicest introductions and they responded with so much enthusiasm, I felt like I had just made to Spy in 1989.
She sensed what I needed, piled my plate high. Empathy is such a rare quality in this business. Strange. You should think it's the hallmark of good journalism, but I find her the exception. A big one. She looked up at me as I first approached, smiled at me, and gazed inside me.
I am tempted to say that's the quality I admired most in her, but that would be to ignore her handling of the photo. They wanted to run one of those postage-sized mug shots of me. In theory, I was ecstatic. Except I didn't have anything to give them. It was very late in the process, she had torn up the Perspectives page to include me. The story had to run Sunday, that gave me three to four hours to come up with a photo. You must have something, she said. Anything will do, as long as it's in color. Anything might do for her. This was the first appearance of my face in print, and right beside my best work ever. I don't take a lot of pictures. I do have a camera, but I'm never sure where I keep it. When I do get the photos back I always cringe at the results. Except this one. I had this one photo, and it was recent, and it was in color, and I didn't look particularly ugly, and I thought it really captured the way I felt when I wrote. Except I wasn't wearing a shirt.
I'm seated in the large gutted window of a deserted crumbling barn up somewhere out in the Rocky Mountains. I've got one arm raised to grip the top of the frame just above me, causing my right bicep to flex. Great pose, because it wasn't posed. I was just relaxing for once with a camera trained on me, and it just happened the way my writing happens when I just let go and quit trying so hard. It really worked. The casually-flexed bicep was my favorite. Kinda made me look hot. But slightly less professional than forgetting to include my phone number on an email.
It could work, though. I test-cropped it at home with four slips of paper and they completely obscured the skin. I drew the scissors back three times to slice it, but I don't have a steady hand, and it was the only remaining copy and I had lost the negative the day I acquired it. I could not picture myself bringing that photo in to the newspaper, even though it was perfect, so I scouted around some more, dumped out every photo envelop from every shoebox in every closet. I used up more than a precious hour of the dwindling time left to cut the story. And I could not find one decent photo I could bear to be shown in public.
(I still can't really. It's the same damn photo half an inch to the left there at the top of the sidebar. Yes, it's at least five years old now. Yes my hair is a little more gray. And you might not believe the skin can be cropped out effectively based on what you see here with your own eyes, but that's a long story involving a communication problem with somebody doing me a favor, and I haven't been able to bring myself to ask him to crop it again.)
So I handed Sue the photo through a stream of jumbled disclaimers and a tragically pained expression on my face, expecting to be smacked on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper.
"This will do fine," she said. "We'll just crop away this beefcake . . . " She pulled out a grease pencil, marked it up and held it back several inches. "This will do fine."
I would have done the same for her eventually, but only after ribbing her mercilessly. She spared me all that, though the hint of a smirk assured me she wanted to, and I have no doubt the staff cackled insanely once I was safely out of earshot, but she actually managed to compliment me in the process. Must have sensed I was even less confident about my appearance.
They go through so many guest columnists on the op-ed page, I didn't think she'd remember me when I sent a short note more than two years later. She had appeared on a local public affairs show immediately after September 11, and I was struck by the sense of calm she exuded, the comfort I took in her presence, even through the enormous distance of the television. I had felt it before, each time she appeared on the program, but I never realized how much I needed it until that moment.
"How nice to hear from you," she wrote back. "I was thinking about you late last week as we tried to gin up [a September 11th] Perspective front." She went on to praise my work, a feature of every email I ever received from her.
Do established writers forget how ego-crushing this field can be or do they just lack the time to encourage us? Do I find the time I ought to to encourage people even further back than me? There must be thousands of struggling writers out there for every one who has made--it's an impossible task, but Sue seemed intent on making up for the rest of us. She always found the time to encourage me. "That's great, Dave," she wrote later. "You really are a fine writer. I don't suppose you'll ever apply for Voices again now, will you? Our loss. . . ." She didn't have to say that. But those were the words I survived on when I could barely afford groceries and the postman delivered another rejection letter every other week. We would go months without corresponding, but I always felt she was out there looking after me. "I'm thoroughly enjoying watching your career," she wrote once. That's my all-time favorite message about my work from anyone.
She answered every email promptly, personally and warmly. Until last month, when I received this oddly cryptic response:
Howdy -- I have some health stuff going on and will be in the office and
checking e-mail only intermittently. If your material needs immediate
attention please contact . . . That's a new address, so please make a note of it.
Thanks, Sue.
Man. Talk about an understatement. By that time, she had already moved into a hospice, meaning, I assume, that she had resigned herself to the end of it and was preparing to die. I wish I knew. She handled it so calmly and disarmingly in the email, which was just her style, so I should have seen through it. I didn't. I had no idea and I never got the chance to visit her, which was probably best, because I imagine she was overwhelmed with well-wishers. I only saw her interact with the people in her life that once, but it was hard to miss how much they admired her. And adored her. I know I do.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
