What is your current job?
I’m a reporter for the LA Times, where I mainly cover the insanity of the L.A. Sheriff’s Department. Before that, I covered prisons in Texas, first for the Houston Chronicle and then for The Marshall Project. I have also written one book, a memoir called “Corrections in Ink.” I guess the elevator pitch version is that it’s a book about how I went from being in prison to being a prisons reporter. Now, with support from the New America Fellows Program, I’m in the early stages of working on a second one. This time, it’s part memoir and part narrative nonfiction, based on a magazine article I wrote last year about men who play Dungeons & Dragons on death row.
What was your first byline?
When I was growing up, the local newspaper in Lancaster, Penn., had a small section written by teens. My tenth-grade English teacher told the class about it, and I thought it seemed like a cool thing to try. I did a lot of lukewarm movie reviews, occasional reviews of moody indie albums, a feature on the history of superstitions around Friday the 13th and a couple longer pieces about figure skating. I don’t remember which of those was my first but I remember I was thrilled with the pay: $20.
What was your first real job in journalism?
The Ithaca Times! A small alt-weekly in upstate New York, where I covered the county legislature and three small towns.
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How did you get it?
Well, this requires a little backstory: I spent the latter part of my teens and the first half of my 20s struggling with heroin addiction. At 26 I went to prison, and got released a little under two years later.
A few months after I got out, a guy I used to get high with called me and said that he had a friend — Glynis — who was a reporter and editor at the Ithaca Times and that she was looking to interview women who’d been in the county jail. So Glynis drove out to the house I’d paroled to in bumfuck nowhere and talked to me for an hour or two about what it was like going through the system there as a woman.
At the end, she told me she’d Googled some of the things I’d written in the past — I guess stuff I did for the college newspaper before my arrest — and that I was “pretty good” and could try writing for her if I wanted to. I think the first article I did was coverage of a town board meeting where they were talking about state environmental review requirements. I only remember it because I described — repeatedly —- a “seeker” review and Glynis kindly explained it was a “SEQR” review. It got corrected before publication and I did not get fired or die of embarrassment.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
If you are worrying whether journalism is a stable career path, don’t worry — it’s not. That used to stress me out a lot, but it is a little less stressful now than it once was because I realize that, if nothing else, journalism has given me a lot of valuable skills and experience that will carry over to any other field if I have to make the jump (though hopefully I don’t have to.)