News from Wallace House Archives

From the Head Fellow: It Takes a Plane Crash

My first question when interviewing prospective candidates asks for their professional dreams, because I think dreams come true. Wrong dream for MJF, wrong candidate for the program. Having no dreams indicates either that the person needs a year at Michigan, or that he/she is beyond our ability to help. Those selected hear a question of the same ilk during my first conference with them, in September. I want to know how Fellows plan to use the year in Ann Arbor to shape their lives long thereafter.

What most don’t know is that I use the same technique on myself. Every January, I assign myself a few priorities. Last year one was “more writing.” I wasn’t thinking of the academic variety, which often strikes me as very few people talking to one another in specialized languages. Nor did I mean the missives drafted for University political and fund-raising purposes. They are a form of power writing that had to be mastered to build the Fellowships, but are even narrower than scholarly texts. I meant journalism.

I have been committing journalism sporadically ever since leaving Time, but it has generally been limited to comments on the profession. I take that to be an integral responsibility for anyone in the sort of privileged position I so enjoy, and I take it seriously. But it lacks elements of both the personal and the universal, and the more I followed the work of Fellowship alums, the more surely I self-diagnosed a case of performance envy.

Branching out presented the same angst I see in Fellows’ faces when I prod them towards trying something they hadn’t thought about before. Some of the things I wanted to write about were personal, which presented a problem I hadn’t known existed. At issue was my training and a lifetime of practice, all of it geared to eschewing the first- person singular. Using that inti- mate little pronoun in public just didn’t seem professional. Getting over “I-embarrassment” took lots of reading, wastebaskets full of false starts — and the realization that if I were to continue pushing Fellows to re-work their careers, I had best ignore the gollywobbles and get started on mine.

There was a practical issue of markets and editors. Both styles and personnel had undergone generation- morph since the last time I had approached them on a submissions level in the 1970’s. It was a little daunting. Somewhere in the process, however, I realized that I was failing to apply my own Lesson #1 — “Talk to those you know. ” Even before moving to the Fellowships in 1986, I had preached it for a decade as director of the University’s Master’s Degree in Journalism. There was a whole roster of experts out there. All that prevented me from consulting them was that our relationships had been formed the other way around, with their seeking wisdom, my attempting to supply it. Changing roles seemed weird at first, but as always it proved that craft knows no true seniority of age because there is always so much to learn.

Al Día/Costa Rica

My “Charleses” are among the best. They are Fellows and former students who have advised me at the European edition of The Wall Street Journal and the mother ship in New York, NBC, ABC , The Chronicle of Higher Education , The New York Times, Michigan Public Radio, and National Public Radio. Then, last December 20, new subject matter fell out of the sky and increased the pace of my experiment.

The small plane carrying the entire family — Julia and I, our two sons and daughter-in-law — crashed and burned in a Costa Rican jungle. Amazingly, we all survived. Miraculously, none of the injuries, not even Julia’s 12 fractures, will leave injuries that are permanent. What is for keeps, I sense, is my return to commit- ting journalism regularly in addition to my commitment to it through the Fellowships. The change amounts to something of a personal transformation. As many Fellows know, a call for openness to that sort of experience throughout their professional lives is what follows my questions to them about dreams and priorities. It expresses my highest hope for all Michigan Journalism Fellows — including me.