Lacey Fosburgh, 1943-1993
A Teacher Thanks her Teacher
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Dear Lacey:
I thought of you the other day (think of you often) when a reporter was driving me nuts with her incessant self-doubt.
I told her: “This is silly. You absolutely have what it takes to pull this off. You just have to step out of your own way.”
What I wanted to say was: “Get over yourself! Get over yourself or get out of here! Your problem is never going to be talent –it’s always going to be psychology!”
That’s what you said to me – remember? – maybe 20 years ago.
I never forgot it.
It’s taken me that many years to see how right you were.
I imagine my reporter didn’t get the full force of the message from what I told her. She might have, had I been more like you.
I never got a chance to tell you (did I? can’t remember): You changed my life, and I am ever so grateful.
I’ll never forget the first day you walked into our newsroom. Were you tall? Or did you just seem so, with your unremitting elegance, regal carriage, perfect blond-streaked hair, straight nose, those blue-blood cheek bones, and clothes, whether jeans and T-shirt or silk and tweed, that made you look like you just stepped off of Fifth Avenue.
You stood out so in our newsroom, a teetering downtown cavern with added on rooms connected by sloping floors covered in cracked linoleum and down-to-the nub carpet.
“Are you going to see the … writing coach?” people asked each other.
You could taste the skepticism. What it really was, I see now, was fear.
(Maybe she’ll tell me I’m not as good as I think I am…)
Back then, nobody knew what a writing coach was. We just knew you’d been asked to come and help with the writing. Oh, like we need help from a …what is it?
Do you remember that first staff discussion about quote, unquote good writing (as you used to say)?
Among the stories you’d chosen to talk about was one of mine. It was a story about a premie baby who’d just spent a year in the hospital and was now getting ready to go home.
You read the first few grafs aloud.
“Is that a nice picture?” you asked.
People nodded.
Yes, nice picture.
“Very nice writing,” you said.
My stomach buckled. Something about the way you said very nice.
“Is it a complete picture?” you asked.
People mumbled, looked down at the story, reread the top hoping to see some kind of right answer appear.
Nothing.
You said: “Here we have a very nice story about a tiny baby in this amazing hospital with all this technology, a story about – what? The triumph of medicine and technology in keeping this tiny little thing alive…? And then what…?”
Silence.
You said: “Let me ask you this – how much did it cost to keep this little baby going with all these fancy machines? How much per day? How much over the course of the year? Who paid? Who made the decision that that amount of money, whatever it was, was worth it?”
Then someone else said, “So maybe instead of a story about the triumph of medicine, it should have been a story about … weighing the cost of one life, and how you do that?”
“Exactly,” you said. “And which one is a better story?”
The weighing-the-cost story, obviously.
My very nice story had no mention of cost, no mention of which decisions were made and how in weighing those costs. The most basic information needed to make the story complete. It was a donut-hole story—you’re writing around it with a lot of nice phrases and just the right splash of emotion (“very nice writing”) but there is this gaping hole, the most basic element needed to make the story stick.
I don’t remember much else about the session that day, but I do remember this:
At that moment, a window opened on my understanding of what it is we do, don’t do, should do, as journalists. Of how easily we tend to dig in, in defensive mode, when we get to a certain level of “good-ness,” afraid to push beyond—because if we do, we’ll find out how much there is we don’t yet know. Of how writing isn’t about words and sentences at all, but rather, about hard information, about how this bit connected to that one or another creates meaning, structure, the things that bore into the brain cells and make people sit up and go, Oh wow. About how the words and the sentences are just the tools we use to express those deeper things.
You came into my life one day and started asking me questions like:
What is the informational core of the story?
The emotional core?
The intellectual?
What’s the sociological thicket it crawls around in?
What’s your favorite word in the story? Why?
What’s keeping you from writing it the way you see it?
These are questions I use all the time now with reporters I work with.
Oh – that’s the other thing:
The very last time I saw you—after nine wonderful years of your mentoring, teaching and friendship—you were in the hospital. In a coma. David said I could talk to you and that you would hear me. I was pregnant with my second son and wanted you to know.
I said, “Hi Lace – guess what? I’m going to have another little boy. I thought you’d be happy to know.” I thought I saw you faintly smile.
It wasn’t until the next year, a year after you were gone, that I really began teaching, that teaching became my life.
So I just wanted you to know that.
I ask reporters all the time now about their favorite word, about the thicket their story crawls in, and sometimes I tell them to get over themselves. Well, maybe not exactly that way, yet. But I’m working on it.
And did I say thank you?
(Note: Photo of Lacey Fosburgh is from the jacket of her latest novel, India Gate, (c) 1991 by Neil Reichline)
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