Sometimes I have a hard time separating myself from my reporter past.

Housing the brave in Bridgeport

As a child, I had a very rigid definition of what veterans were: Veterans were old men who fought in WWII. They hung out at the VFW in Oakville and only ever came out for parades. I thought of them, alternately, as nice old men and the walking counterparts of my history lessons.

I admit to having been an ignorant child (I didn’t even think of my two uncles, who served in the Navy, as vets because they weren’t geriatric) but veterans have changed a lot since 2001. Now most vets I meet are in their mid-20s. They are my friends, and my classmates, and my co-workers, and my students.  They are, in many cases, very young women who come home to their children and who need a place to live.

In Bridgeport, veteran housing group Homes for the Brave has been paying close attention to that last group of veterans: Female vets who need housing, both for themselves and their children. Homes for the Brave, which runs a 42-bed facility for male vets up the street from my house, has been trying for a year and a half to provide beds for homeless female veterans. This year, in August, the group obtained zoning approval for a 17-bed group home for female vets on Elmwood Ave in Bridgeport’s West End. This is huge.

When I wrote a story about this in 2009, only three of the state’s 106 beds for homeless veterans were set aside for women. Which is ridiculous, because something like a quarter of Connecticut’s soldiers serving abroad are female. Added to that, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans says that female veterans are 3.6 more likely to become homeless than females who aren’t veterans. And they are two to four more likely to become homeless than males, according to a 2007 study by the National Alliance to End Homelessness Research Institute. Why? The study suggested that more females had experienced traumatic events before they joined the military (ie, joining the service to escape abuse) and after discharge are dealing with PTSD on multiple levels.

Whatever the reasons, the state needs more housing for female vets.  I’m thrilled to think that that the first shelter for female vets (and their children, up to age 2) will be in our city. It’s a really big step in the right direction.

 

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Writer Wednesday: Richard Russo

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Richard Russo thinks of himself as a comic writer.

I had the advantage of being able to interview Richard Russo for my newspaper’s entertainment section just as I was writing a craft essay about him for my MFA program.

Russo was coming to town this past June to discuss That Old Cape Magic. I had just finished reading Empire Falls, and I was very excited to speak with him.

During the interview, Russo surprised me by referring to himself as a comic writer. In fact, he compared himself to Mark Twain, with whom he appeared in Granta magazine this summer. That ran counter to my observations as a reader. Sure, there were moments of humor – pure slapstick humor, actually – within the 483 pages of Empire Falls. But the book was more of an American epic, not the work of a humorist.

I didn’t get it until Russo told me that he considers people to be funny.  Just watching people being people, he said, can be enormously funny. That made sense, because Empire Falls is a lot like sitting in your hometown, having coffee at the diner and watching everyone you know as they walk by, living their lives.

And he’s right – people are funny. We’re funny in the same way that our cousins in the monkey house at the zoo are funny. We have basically the same motivations, and our attempts to get what we’re after can be just as clumsy and brash. And that can be hilarious, or it can be horrible.

“I do gravitate toward folly,” said Russo. “Sometimes there are tragic consequences to human folly.”

For the full story, click this link. For the craft essay I wrote about Russo’s graceful management of multiple viewpoint characters, read on.

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Bridgeport ballot update and rant.

Oh, Bridgeport.

I’d hate to be in the Bridgeport registrar of voters’ office today. It’s a very narrow office in McLevy Hall, with just enough standing room in the waiting area for about three large would-be voters, but everyone seems to be cramming in there, thanks to Tuesday’s ballot shortage: Mayor Bill Finch, his three-businessman investigation team, CT post reporters, AP reporters, television news teams, representatives from Tom Foley’s campaign, representatives from Dan Malloy’s campaign and assorted other helpful types, including my old college classmate Tim Herbst, who is the Republican first selectman in Trumbull.

At least that’s what it looks like in my head after I read the CT Post’s coverage this morning.

UPDATE : Votes are being counted into the night here in Bridgeport. Head over to Lennie Grimaldi’s blog to check out up-to-the-minute info on that.

He even has pictures. (Points to my fellow Bantams if they can spot Tim!)

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Blogging is not the same as reporting.

For the past several years, I’ve been listening to the tired debate between bloggers and news organizations. It’s been going on for a while, and in some cases the lines have blurred so much that it isn’t an issue any more. At its most extreme, the argument ran thus: Bloggers say Big Journalism is dying and they may or may not be right. News organizations say bloggers are hacks, and they may or may not be right.

I always came down – more or less – on the side of the journalists, and after last night’s amateur foray into political blogging, I still do.

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Two more hours of voting in Bridgeport.

(Scroll down to the bottom for updates and a PDF of the Secretary of the State’s statement.)

This is crazy. Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz and Superior Court Judge Marshall Berger just ruled that polls in my fair city of  Bridgeport will remain open until 10 p.m. Why? Because we don’t have enough ballots. Because lines are forming around polling stations in town. And because there are people who allegedly cast illegal votes because panicked workers photocopied ballots.

According to some of my fave news sources, Mayor Finch went to the state this evening to ask for two more hours of voting in Bridgeport because only 21,000 ballots were ordered. We have upwards of 60,000 registered voters in Bridgeport. How, exactly, could too few ballots be ordered after President Barack Obama was in town Saturday, whipping up the crowds? When we have so many close races and so many reasons to want to vote? The same news sources say that GOP chairman Chris Healy filed a complaint about the photocopied ballots.

Bysiewicz is allowing poll workers to photocopy the ballots (although the state is apparently doing some of the copying because we aren’t able to copy enough of them in town), but those will have to be counted by hand – the way the absentee ballots are counted.

This is not the last we’ve heard of this. I hope the newly-elected registrars of voters are going to be ready to start sorting this mess tomorrow. I may be updating this later, because news like this is crack to me. Read more

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Election cramming

Last night, I spent a few hours cramming for the election. It’s always kind of a project.  I don’t vote a party line. I want info on all the candidates before I go to the polls, and sometimes (depsite the CT Post’s extremely useful election site) that information can be hard to get.

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Christmas for reporters

I will miss my job as a reporter tomorrow; it will be the first election night in a decade I have not worked.

Election night is like Christmas for journalists. Preparing for it can be stressful. A week in advance, you kind of dread it. But once the day arrives, everyone in the newsroom works together, shares a meal of fast food, and stays up all night. And, like Christmas, you never know what you’re going to get at the end of the evening. Read more

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The merits of failure

I wanted to be an astronaut, an archaeologist and a paleobotanist. Because Dr. O'Connell has a nice ring to it.

Last week I was hanging out with a friend and she told me something I couldn’t believe: In an effort to protect the self-esteem of children, some communities are introducing team sports without winners and losers.

This baffles me. How is a person supposed to know what he or she is good at if she doesn’t fail at something? If you really want to play baseball, and you’re not much good at it, isn’t it better for you to know early on? That way you can start working to get better at baseball, or you can decide that all the practice isn’t worth it to you and turn to something else. But failure is very useful because it forces us to confront our weaknesses.

I never really played team sports, but I can clearly remember a time when failure forced me to reevaluate my own aspirations. When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. Or any kind of scientist, really. I thought I’d be a good archaeologist. I thought about going into geology, or marine biology, or paleobotany, or anything that required a white lab coat.

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Writer Wednesday: James Baldwin

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I quoted him for years, but I never knew who Baldwin was until last fall.

It came as a complete surprise to me that James Baldwin wrote fiction. I had it in my mind that he was an educator, an essayist and an activist. It just hadn’t occurred to me that did all that and wrote fiction.

I first became aware of Baldwin when I was working as an education reporter for the Stamford Times. As part of my duties I had to cover several graduations every spring, three of them in Stamford. The superintendent there was fond of quoting Baldwin’s paradox of education from the writer’s 1963 A Talk to Teachers. The super included the exact same quote from Baldwin at each of the graduations every single year. I must have heard it 15 times.

I got hip to the super’s graduation speech tricks by the second year. Rather than look up the paradox of education again and again and again, and rather than try to take down the whole, lengthy quote during the graduation speech, I simply printed out the quote and kept it in my desk at work:

The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.  The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.  To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.  But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around.  What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.  If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish.

I grew pretty familiar with the paradox of education as I tried to gracefully work it into three separate graduation stories every June. So last year, when a professor, Kim McLarin, mentioned Baldwin during the first workshop for my MFA program, I snapped to attention. James Baldwin? A-talk-to-teachers Baldwin? Paradox-of-education Baldwin?  We couldn’t be talking about the same Baldwin, could we?

Now, after having read Another Country and read more about Baldwin, I’m impressed by all the things Baldwin did. He was an activist for civil rights, he wrote fervently about racial and sexual issues and he was a prolific and eloquent author.

Below the break is the craft essay I wrote for Kim about plot in Another Country.

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Classroom stage fright

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I teach at the local community college. But one day a year, at my department head’s behest, I teach three workshops of high school students at the college’s high school journalism symposium. This is my fourth year of teaching the workshop, and every year I kind of dread it.

I have to get up earlier than usual, I’m not used to dealing with high school students, and I never know what kinds of kids are going to be walking into my workshop. Plus, despite the fact that I’ve been standing in front of a class twice a week for the last few years, teaching gives me a wicked case of stage fright. Even if I’m teaching kids I’ve been working with for years.

So needless to say, the high school journalism symposium gives me palpitations. Every year, I’m awake all night before the event. I worry about everything. I’m not sure if what I say will be interesting to the students, I’m not sure if I’m going to make myself look like an idiot and I don’t know if I’m going to have a disciplinary problem on my hands.

But you know, it’s never as bad as I’m afraid it’s going to be.  I think I’ve only had two belligerent high schoolers in twice as many years. For the most part, they’re respectful, cooperative and fun. I’m almost always sad to see them leave at the end of my workshop.  They ask good questions. One of the best ones I heard today came from a student who has been on her high school newspaper a month. We were talking about interviews, and she asked me if I’m ever scared when I’m about to interview someone.

Yes, I told her. I’m always scared before an interview. Without exception. I get butterflies before I make a phone call. I have to take a deep breath before I go into someone’s office to ask them a few questions. I am always, always nervous. Because you never know what that interview might turn into.

It’s kind of like teaching, actually. And usually – like teaching – the interview goes way better than I thought it would.

 

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