Many think of the letters-to-the-editor page in local newspapers as the place where those with deep-seated opinions and agendas (and infinite confidence in the same) are invited to let loose. It’s just a soapbox, right?
For me, however, the page provided something more serious and lasting: an early, and essential, access point to journalism.
When I was a teenager in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the print media still had an aura of incomparable prestige, and to win publication of a letter to the editor seemed about as momentous a feat to me as selling an article outright. That the writer was paid for one contribution and not for the other struck me as an insignificant distinction. In either case, I reckoned, sentences I crafted with care for their impact and insight would be printed for hundreds of thousands (or tens of thousands, or at least more than hundreds) to marvel at.
My debut among the ranks of letter-writers was auspicious: In the summer of 1999, when I was 16, a rather pointed missive I wrote in defense of my then-favorite filmmaker, the recently deceased Stanley Kubrick, was published in The New York Times—the first of three times in which my name was affixed in the Gray Lady to something I had written. (Happily, the other two, many years later, were for articles I wrote on assignment.)
Yet, living in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, I had no real sense that my Kubrick letter, pithy and punchy though it was, had made an impact. Consequently, I strove to make my presence felt on the letters-to-the-editor page in my own backyard or, more precisely, in the paper that collided with my pavement each morning: The Columbus Dispatch. In January 2000, I found my first subject: the recent retirement of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, whose greatness I extolled over seven short, surprisingly readable paragraphs. Cleverly, I appended my age (I had not yet turned 17) beside my name so that readers would take note of my youthful brilliance.
My Schulz letter, though, was pretty meek and mild stuff. I soon found within myself the urge to stake out positions in print—controversial positions.
In January 2001, Ohio State University—the institution whose athletic programs dominate and at times seem to all but consume my hometown—had given the heave-ho to football coach John Cooper and, after what I took to be an overdone search, imported Jim Tressel, who proceeded to lead the Buckeyes to all manner of gridiron greatness (and, seemingly a lifetime later, became the state’s lieutenant governor under Gov. Mike DeWine).
Being a bookish sort, I rolled my eyes at the incessant coverage that accompanied the transition from Cooper to Tressel.
I dashed off another letter to The Columbus Dispatch—this one, far more aggrieved than my warm-and-fuzzy paean to the practitioner of Peanuts. (I would later discover how much newspaper editors admire the art of alliteration. See? I did it again.) The headline chosen for my letter reflects something of its spirit: “Media went overboard in search for football coach.” “The local media would be well-advised to resume their rule as the bearer of news and information, unless they truly believe that football is more important than the inauguration of a new president,” I wrote.
I wonder: Do I still sound this strident when I write? I also note that my letter, written on the heels of Bush v. Gore, was an early example of my willingness to shoehorn politics into any conversation and to subtly hint that I was not just another liberal—hence my subtly respectful reference to the “new president,” George W. Bush.)
This letter begat another letter in much the same tone: In August 2001, I wrote to complain about a column in which the newspaper’s book critic and one of its regular correspondents had taken what I regarded as an insufficiently reverent tone towards James Joyce’s Ulysses, which, I guess, I then regarded as an unassailable masterpiece. This letter, too, was printed, though in rereading it, I can tell that I was starting to bristle at the confines of the letter-to-the-editor form — that is, a few short paragraphs laser-focused on a single topic. Instead, I ranged rather freely, comparing Ulysses to King Lear and The Sound and the Fury. “One can take on the challenges posed by these works and be humble enough to admit that, in some instances, the reader just maybe is not up to the level of the author,” I wrote, huffily.
To my eyes now, the real sound and fury in this letter came courtesy of its author.
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Back then, I was mighty pleased with myself for arguing in print with a newspaper’s bylined writers, though in time I learned that this was no great distinction. In my experience, newspapers take some delight in running letters in which readers express annoyance with their writers. In 2013, I began freelancing for my hometown paper, and in the years that followed, several letters were printed in which my judgment and taste as a critic was called into question.
But I shrugged off these critiques since I had graduated from being a pro bono writer of letters to a moderately well-compensated writer for hire. My credo had become that of Truman Capote, who once told The Paris Review that he was “physically incapable . . . of writing anything that I don’t think will be paid for.”
Yet, pay notwithstanding, sometimes I wonder if what I am doing today is all that different from what I was doing then. Those early experiences proved that I could write in response to timely topics, and do well enough to clear the bar of making it into print. You might say that once I climbed onto my soapbox, and that I never quite climbed off.
