Salvage Heart

"You can't know who you are if you don't know where you are." --Wendell Berry

Fishing around online, looking to see when Wendell Berry might next push West, when I found a citation of his work by Timothy Egan, journalist-turned bookist whose The Worst Hard Time account of the Dust Bowl won last year's National Book Award.

Turns out Egan is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's July writer in residence, which entitles him to absolution from word counts.

Egan's ode to Seattle, the once and future emerald city, is at 2,500 words a little baggy for newsprint (that's what, over 70 column inches?) but worthwhile.

Timothy Egan on Seattle

Egan is the 7th of 12 writers in the P-I's series. His piece veers from timeless to topic, with a jab at a certain Mariner 6'10" tall.

"I like the fact that a few boo-birds have started to infiltrate the censorious nest of Safeco Field, especially when a first baseman is getting paid something like $14 million a year to hit -- what? -- barely .200."

Also of note: four short video interviews with Egan, in which he explains why he got into journalism--to write books, of course!

"I didn't want to go to the Iowa Writers School [sic] and get in to the navel-gazing school of minimalist fiction where you write about what other navel gazing graduate students are thinking about. And--I know I'm putting down a huge part of contemporary fiction....I was really influenced by Tom Wolfe's essay some time ago, 'Stalking the 10,000-footed beast' [sic] (Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast, which ran in the November 1989 Harper's)...where he said 'The problem with most American writers now is that they don't mix it up with the public.' Dickens, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Dorothy Parker, Joan Didion--you name any terrific writer, and you find those people are reporters at their core."

Let's see...I got in to journalism because, well, did I? We'll see, won't we.

With both feet, beginning September 10. The thumping sound is my heart racing, and the creditors already beating a path to the front door.

Labels: journalism, newspapers, Seattle authors, Timothy Egan, Wendell Berry, writing