What general skills have you learned through your professional work?
Travels with Charley #5
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches around once a month, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering (questions for future stories), and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
I spent a piece of the summer at the Princeton Summer Journalism Program, teaching 39 incoming high school seniors how to be journalists and how to correctly game the dining hall. Much like everything about being 17, this feels trite, but it was genuinely affirming to spend time learning with young people on the cusp of opening up their worlds. So much wonder! If you know first-generation high school students from limited-income backgrounds who are interested in writing and/or journalism, definitely encourage them to apply to PSJP. And if you get a chance to spend a couple weeks with bright teens just starting to realize what the world can give them, do it. It makes even the bleakest dying profession seem full of possibility and even the most in-denial adult feel wizened.
What I’m reading
Jesse Nathan’s miraculous use of language to cartwheel through end-of-summer nostalgia — I dare you to read one of his poems aloud and say the rhythms don’t astound you (Eggtooth):
Home after an afternoon, say, goosing uncle’s cranky catamaran
across the pixie humor of the reservoir’s surface.
Corker of a day. Sunset melting on its pan.
I drink from the spigot by the well, and it beards me in a watery lace.
Mom salts ice in the wooden bucket
of nostalgia, and we all crank the cream till its stuck
paddles stop their play. And speechless, eat our luck.
Haley Howle with the onomatopoeia of summer (The New York Times Magazine):
My go-to move is a pike dive. It goes like this: right foot, left foot, skip, bounce, feet together, hips up, head down, hands to toes, legs straight above my head and vwoosh.
Miriam Toews, best-ever at indelible, tender descriptions (All My Puny Sorrows):
Living with my mother is like living with Winnie the Pooh. She has many adventures, getting herself into and out of trouble guilelessly, and all of these adventures are accompanied by a few lines of gentle philosophy. There’s always a little bit more to learn every time you get your head stuck in a honey pot if you’re my mother.
Krithika Varagur’s description of Lagos, in a piece that makes me nostalgic for what reported features can be with real resources (Harper’s):
The stretch marks of the developing world are visible everywhere: cheap cell phone data sold at hand- painted stalls, piles of refuse, strip malls that pop up overnight like mushrooms, awe- inspiring traffic, and unflinching sales- children who dash through it.
What I’m wondering
What general skills have you learned through your professional work? (How to listen well? How to manage someone’s expectations? How to read the room?)
What’s a trait from family or friends that you recognize in yourself?
What’s the best sandwich?
What I’m writing
For Bloomberg Businessweek, I reported on the sometimes exploitative, often bizarre world of summer internships. Read it and feel grateful you never have to do pepperoni math again.
When I talk about interviewing kids for work, fellow adults without children often ask me, “How do you make conversation with a kid?” So I wrote a how-to for Vox about talking to children without turning into a stilted weirdo (featuring advice from Ben, an extremely wise 11-year-old). Warning: Reading this article may make you better at non-stilted conversation with people of all ages.
Aspiring freelancers and young journalists often reach out to me with questions, so I put together some advice about how to freelance on my website, including a finance spreadsheet (request access and I’ll share it with you) and a sample invoice. Some of this is specific to journalism, but I think most of it applies to any creative field, including the scattergraph of work assignments that I live by (see below). As always, if you have questions about freelancing/a creative career, consider me a resource.
yours,
Charley