I started in this business writing obituaries for $6.50 an hour because my car needed a transmission. Within six weeks, families were calling the paper to request me specifically. That should tell you something, though I’m still not sure what.
What I learned writing obituaries is the thing I’ve been doing ever since: sit with a person long enough to understand not just the facts of their life but the weight of it. What they meant to the people around them. What would be missing now. That’s the job. Everything else is technique.
I spent fourteen years at a daily paper in Virginia, then eleven years at a national magazine for readers over fifty, then eight years running a regional publication in the same state. I’ve edited ten thousand pieces by other people and written some myself that I’m not ashamed of. A series on Vietnam veterans at a VA medical center that I still consider the best work I’ve ever done. A weekly column about small things that turn out to be large things. A lot of obituaries, if you count the ones I’ve written in my head about bad ideas.
I built the Sunday Evening Review because I sat for two hours with a group of people at my mother’s assisted living center in Terre Haute and asked them what they read and what was missing. Twelve women and three men who were not dying, who were living, and who were tired of being written to as though those were the same thing.
One of them, Betty, seventy-nine, told me: “Write something worth my time. I don’t have as much of it as you do.”
I think about Betty every day.
I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, with my wife Susan, who is smarter than me and will confirm this if you ask. We have a golden retriever named Hank who is old and slow and my favorite creature on earth. I read every morning on the back porch from 5:30 to 7:00 with coffee so strong Susan won’t drink it. The porch has a ceiling fan that wobbles.
This publication is the thing I have been building toward for thirty-five years without knowing it. I intend to make it worth your time.