Regular readers may be interested to see what happened when I edited the blog Hunting 101 for the Alaska Dispatch News We Alaskans Sunday magazine. I only had a day to do it, and I liked the tone of the blog, but it was, well, bloggy. Informal, written in one take. Believe it or not– it’s still very close in many ways– it took me more than a few hours to make it better– writing (and thinking) my way into both the story and the meaning. It is kind of serious, but honestly, killing an animal is about as very serious. Writing is half the impulse to share a story or an idea or a feeling, and half making that story, idea, or feeling a stand alone piece. It seems to me that if something I write is going to be printed in a newspaper it should provoke a few big-ish thoughts. All art should do that. One of my first editors signed her emails with “provoke thought.” Another one added the words of Mary Baker Eddy who said the mission of The Christian Science Monitor is, ” To injure no man but to bless all mankind.”
