The Emporia Gazette

February 14, 2012

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I grabbed the mail on the way out of the driveway earlier this week and threw it on the passenger seat. But it was a Tuesday, one of my favorite mail-days of the week. So I paused a bit to sort through it because in that stack of bills, magazine expiration notices, newsletters and just plain junk, was my Newsweek.

For this mother of three who is lucky to have time to read her own hometown paper at the end of the day, every other week I take my own “time out” to flip to the back of my Newsweek and read “The Last Word” by Anna Quindlen.

What I wasn’t expecting on Tuesday, however, was that this “Last Word” really was. It was Quindlen’s farewell column. After nine years of writing for the publication she was saying good-bye.

I couldn’t believe it.

With one eye buried in the magazine and one eye on the road all the way to my daughters’ swimming practice that evening, I read it over and over, hoping, just hoping, I was missing something and that this journalist, who has become a mentor of sorts — even a friend to me in recent years — wasn’t really closing the lid on her laptop.

So, what does a conservative, small-town, Midwestern, wannabe writer and mother of three have in common with a more liberal-minded Pulitzer-prize winning columnist, novelist and journalist from the East who has written for prestigious publications like The New York Times and Newsweek and who has been on numerous best-seller lists?

Good question.

I was introduced to Quindlen eight or nine years ago after I published one of my first columns in The Gazette. Writing it was like coughing up a lung and a colleague of mine thought reading some of Quindlen’s work may help get my juices flowing.

I was hooked.

In her books “Living Out Loud” and “Thinking Out Loud,” compilations of her New York Times columns written in the 1980s and 1990’s, I saw for the first time how the ordinary things of ordinary life weren’t that ordinary after all — if there was some good wordsmithing at work to tell their stories.

And that’s what Quindlen does so well. From birthday parties to political parties, from women’s rites to women’s rights, she is brilliant at taking something simple and making it worth thinking about and taking something complex and making it relatable and understandable to the average reader — even to a stay-at-home mother whose current events are usually limited to potty training, “ouchies” and spelling words. And, even if you don’t agree with her.

A few years later I had the privilege of meeting Quindlen at a book-signing and speaking engagement nearby, where I’m sure I appeared more like a crazed Anna Quindlen groupie than an intelligent literary admirer. I arrived at the location early hoping to meet her personally. And I did. But what was even more satisfying than that was listening to her share with an auditorium full of fans, what writing is like for her.

It isn’t fun; it isn’t easy, she said. But she loves it anyway.

I couldn’t have agreed with her more.

That may have been one of the few times I have actually concurred with my mentor, unless you count her critique of some of my writing last year when she graciously agreed to edit a few columns of mine via e-mail. She was right when she said sometimes I use too many clichés.

More often than not, however, those columns of hers I’ve grown to love to read every other week on the pages of Newsweek, I generally don’t agree with. In fact, I’ve tackled many of the same issues on the pages of The Gazette myself and my position couldn’t have been more contrary to hers.

But I guess it’s never bothered me much, because despite our ideological differences, I’ve learned a lot from her. She’s challenged me to think critically and not just believe something just because I believe something. She’s helped me to look at an issue from the other side and see the merit in it. From her graceful style and deliberate method to her handle on history and current events, she, in some ways, was the journalism teacher I never had.

In her farewell column she writes that it is time for her to step aside and let the next generation of journalists offer their “fresh perspectives and new ideas” to a country (and a business) that is rapidly changing.

I disagree.

Although the world of journalism and the outlets for excellent reporting and editorial writing are changing, Quindlen’s balance during a time of such reinvention is an important one to have. Finding the extraordinary lessons in the ordinary things of life is so much of what good journalism is all about. Even in her absence, I hope that never changes.

In correspondence from her just this week she commented to me about her farewell to the pages of Newsweek: “It was time. Now I can consume news like a civilian again.”

We wish her the best.