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The Art Of Staying In Your Lanes

A couple weeks ago, I was looking through photos from a book event I did in Washington, D.C. this past May, and I found this one: Photo by Katelyn King/@katelyn.clix) That’s me, on the left, and on the right is my old (as in “former,” “of long standing,”) professor, Michael Downs, who was about to retire from professoring.

I don’t know what he’s saying at the exact moment this photo was taken, but I’m probably about to say, “Did you ever think you’d attend a book signing event for one of your old students at a f***ing clothing store?” Because that’s what this event was. Downs came up from Baltimore, where he was finishing his final semester as director of the Professional Writing program at Towson University. He’d headed there after leaving the University of Montana’s School of Journalism, where we met in 2002.

When I started grad school, I didn’t know much about journalism. But in the practical rural Iowa where I grew up during the ’90s, journalism seemed like the responsible way to learn how to write, because in my mind: DRAWING: Journalism degree —> newspaper (or other journalism) job Creative writing degree —> ??? job ???

So I learned a lot of things, like to not write “utilize” instead of “use,” AP Style, and how to write the first sentence of a story so it was both informative and intriguing. Journalism school wasn’t so much art school as it was a trade school, it seemed to me. DRAWING: SPECTRUM OF ART <- - - >TRADE, with MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING NEAR “ART” and “M.A. IN JOURNALISM” NEAR “TRADE” When I finished, I’d get a job as a reporter or copy editor at a newspaper, and see where that took me.

By my final semester, I didn’t really believe I had what it took to be a newspaper reporter. I had spent the previous summer working as a copy editor at an Idaho paper, laying out newsprint pages and marking up news stories, and that was all right. But the career paths seemed to be: FLOW CHART 1: Get a reporting job at small paper, report on town news, eventually move up or move to a bigger paper FLOW CHART 2: Get a copy editing job at small paper, edit copy + lay out pages, eventually move up or move to a bigger paper

But when my professors talked about former students, or their past jobs as reporters, editors, and feature writers, I just couldn’t envision somebody hiring me for one of those positions. SQUARE PEG: ME ROUND HOLE: Newspaper jobs

But this one professor, Michael Downs, had done all kinds of cool stuff: He had worked as a reporter, a features writer, a sportswriter, and a restaurant critic. And he had an MFA in creative writing! He had published short stories in literary journals (and in The Best American Mystery Stories anthology). Which you don’t see on the resume of many newspaper reporters. But at the time, I didn’t make much of a note of that.

I asked Downs to be my thesis advisor [CIRCLED, WITH “AP STYLE IS “adviser”” IN RED WRITTEN ABOVE] and he agreed. I wrote my thesis on peak bagging. I graduated, and went on to have an unspectacular three-year newspaper career. I quit my last newspaper job for an even lower-paying (!) nonprofit gig, feeling like a failure because I’d paid all that money for a fancy journalism degree and now I wasn’t even going to use it.

When I was 23, I didn’t really understand that you could go outside of the lane you picked in life. I thought you went to school, decided on a certain field, and then worked in that field until you retired. But then newspapers … well, we know what happened to newspapers. I worked at my nonprofit day job and tried to write climbing and outdoor stories on the side. If I was lucky, the check I got for a story would be enough to cover about half of the monthly interest on my student loans.

Downs left the University of Montana in 2007 to teach at Towson University, and continued to do interesting stuff: He wrote a book that won the River Teeth Prize for literary nonfiction, then wrote another book (fiction, short stories) through a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, then another book (historical fiction) which was optioned for a TV series, and lived in Poland for a while during 2021 and 2022 courtesy of a little thing called the Fulbright Program

I kept scrapping, trying to find ways to get paid to write: I wrote essays, blogs, columns, listicles, magazine features, marketing copy, gear reviews, recipes, short film scripts, podcast episodes, poems (not good ones), book reviews, books, self-published books, slogans for T-shirts/stickers/mugs/billboards, and whatever else would pay. Probably almost none of it could be classified as real “journalism,” like I’d learned in school. But it was fun (at times) and I managed to make a living (at times).

This past April, Dani, one of Downs’ grad students at Towson University, asked if I could share how Downs had helped me as a writer and a person, for something she was writing for his upcoming retirement. I wrote back: I spent a bit of time thinking about this, and although Downs was a teacher, mentor, and later became a friend, I think what was so influential to me when I was his student was that he had such an eclectic career as a writer. He had been a newspaper reporter and features writer, a sportswriter, had an MFA, and had worked as a restaurant reviewer, and he just loved good writing and interesting books. I think maybe without knowing it at the time, he might have showed me that there was more than one path to becoming a writer, and I didn't necessarily have to become a newspaper reporter and write about city council meetings—and that the path could be winding and full of different experiences.

If I had been paying attention to Downs while I was in school, I might have noticed that he was showing us that you don’t have to pick a lane and stay in it—you can try a few different lanes and see where they go. [ILLUSTRATION OF LANES] Or, maybe I did notice.

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Check out my new “How To Tell One Story” online writing course here. 

Bybrendan
Updated

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