Yet Another Journalism Assignments

ANOTHER Journ 105 assignment. This is one we were supposed to write on why we were majoring in what we were majoring in, but in the third person.

                Since the time she was small, stories were a huge part of Kate Wehlann’s life.  “I was the grandchild who wanted to be read to while the others wanted to go run around in the backyard or watch a movie.  I was the one who would always ask for one more bedtime story.  I could not get enough of what seemed like my own personal magic – an enchantment that did not seem to affect anyone else I knew.”  

In the fifth grade, she began writing her own stories, spending hours at her desk or at her family’s ancient computer, hammering out rough characters and places that nobody knew about but her.  Her maternal grandfather, Don Daugherty, was her greatest inspiration when it came to storytelling and Brian Jacques, New York Times best selling author of the children’s book series, Redwall (which she admits to still reading from time to time), was the one who inspired her to write these stories down. 

However, upon the death of her grandfather in 2001, it seemed as though the magic of stories and writing would be gone forever.  “It was like a light had gone out in my life.  I couldn’t write for a long time after that and when I finally did start writing again, there was an obvious difference in what I wrote.  The only place you could suitably read it was in a graveyard.”

The idea of publishing her work first came with poetry.  She came across a website called poetry.com and began typing in poems she had written and began writing poetry almost exclusively.  “Bad poetry," she says, “now that I look back on them, but poetry nonetheless.”  Not long after submitting her work, she received an envelope in the mail saying that poetry.com had chosen one of her poems to be published in a book that the site put out every year.  “I was ecstatic.  Eager to see my poem published, I quickly put together the fifty dollars they were charging for what they called a high quality coffee table anthology written by other contributors to the poetry.com website.” 

What they sent her, however, was a five-by-seven hardback, minus a dust cover, with somewhere over 100 poems, better or worse than her own, printed on cheap paper.  “I had seen nicer and cheaper books at Walmart, but those books did not have my poem printed on the first page of them, so I didn't make a fuss.”  Her parents were pretty excited, too, and after calling around to the family, purchased for over two hundred dollars a set of six of the books, which poetry.com tried in vain to keep from sending them.  “We literally waited about eight months more than planned for those books to arrive and after writing several angry letters and waiting on hold for a combined total of what felt like a year and a half on the phone, I decided that, after the books arrived, I would be cutting all ties with poetry.com.”

She was still writing poetry and beginning to delve back into story prose and still wanted to publish my work where people could see it without her having to be present at the time they were reading it.  She tried starting her own websites, but did not have the money for advertising.  “The only hits on the sites were from me trying to make sure the format was correct.”  After some searching on the Internet, she found herself on fictionpress.net, a site where writers of all genres could upload work and get reviews from other writers on the site.  It was perfect.  It was also where she really started writing stories again.  The magic was back.

“My dad often jokes that I have to write the next Harry Potter series so I can fund his retirement; however, I knew, probably long before I acknowledged the fact, that the possibilities of me writing a series as popular and as financially profitable as that of J.K. Rowling right out of college, or ever, in fact, were slim to say the least.”  As her years of high school drew toward their end, Wehlann knew she needed a job that would pay the bills while giving her time to work on her writing.  Her options were few.  “In reality, the only thing I was good at was writing.  It was the only thing I ever really applied myself to.  It was either English teacher or journalist.  I’m not much of a people person, so working with a classroom full of people for seven hours every day was out very quickly.”

After a semester in her Journalism 101 class, she realized that, perhaps, a journalist in the traditional sense, might not be her forte after all.  For a while, her thoughts turned to freelance writing.  Her high school English teacher had a freelance writing business on the side and on several occasions loaned her good writers out to some of her clients.  Freelancing would not pay much, but it would be something she was good at and liked, which is more than could be said for some people.  She is still considering doing something like this on the side, but is not planning to pursue it as a career.

However, her thoughts soon returned to storytelling.  Freelancing would not give her the opportunity to tell the stories she wanted in the way she wanted.  Writing a newspaper column would.  Columnists like John Grogan (of The Philadelphia Enquirer, and author of Marley and Me and The Longest Trip Home) and Dave Barry (The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog; Tricky Business; The Taming of the Screw) have long been favorites of hers and she believes they have served to help influence the way she writes.

And so she sits in her college classes, working her way toward a degree in journalism, trying to channel her grandfather, Walter Cronkite, Mrs. Elliott the English teacher, Dave Barry, and Brian Jacques into something resembling a successful career.  “It’s very much a work in progress, which considering the fact that I’m still in college, is just the way it should be.”