Seagull Guano Blues
September 5, 2007
Labor Day was weird. Like the dull silence before the deluge. Classes begin in their full glory next week. Our second story assignment is to be “pitched” to our RWI professors tomorrow (Thursday, the 6th). This is the genesis of a sellable story, and a necessary function of anybody seeking to write for money. I spent this morning on my beat, The Rockaways, Queens. Rockaway, the word a corruption of the Lenape Indian word for something like “land of our people” or some such translation. Click here to get the Wiki on it. I met with the Rockaway Artists Alliance, an education and outreach group doing all sorts of good things for the community. They run art gallery openings, kids’ activities, public lectures, and more. What did I find? I found too many people in too small a space working too hard to satisfy the cultural needs of a vibrant artistic community.
The Rock, as I call the peninsula, which juts westward off the south shore of Long Island, extends to just south of Coney Island. It is an odd place, and I say this in full awareness of just how odd the rest of NYC can be. The Rock is one of those areas where gentrification and development are clashing in a violence of land grabbing, resulting in the patchwork ‘hoods of expensive homes and run down shacks often separated by a matter of a block. The difference is staggering. Last week I made a left off a bumpy city street crammed with small, run down businesses and a dingy looking medical clinic, onto a wealthy street populated by religion Jewish families. Just in the turn of a corner, the world changes. We will receive training on how to approach topics like race and ethnicity. New York City is a veritable laboratory of race studies. How does a white Jew from Long Island go into a black community and report with a keen and accurate eye? There is no easy answer. But the Process, capital P, at Columba doesn’t seek to tamp down our biases. Rather, the Process allows for them, makes us approach them, question them, acknowledge them.
The journalist is a human, and is not expected to be anything less emotional or less opinionated. Rather, in the short time I’ve been at the school, it has been represented to me that we try to put our judgments in our back pocket, so to speak, while we are out on the beat. Listen to what people have to say, see what is being shown, experience it all with every inch of sense. (My editor wrote here: [But that’s easier said than done . . . HOW do you do it especially in a place like the Rock?] And I say, this is precisely what they DON’T tell you! I found myself struggling on the sidewalk, utterly dejected, yes! That’s the word, dejected. Humanity turned away from me, the people refused to speak. And just when I was at my most desperate, when it seemed that everyone wanted me to go away, I asked one more person, just one. I don’t even remember what I said. But she talked. And talked. Man, did she talk and it tasted like fresh water after an eternity in the desert. I was overjoyed, and reinvigorated. And I went into a Nursing Home and lo and behold the desk clerk wanted to talk to me. Three hours later I had six real sources and thirty rejections. But I had those six. And I was still alive. When it’s all over, when shadows fall upon the mountain, we go home and unpack what we’ve seen, heard, smelled, tasted. Parse it out, put it into 3-D space and see how it all relates and then the story resolves.
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