What is Draft Four about?
Great question.
To answer this, let’s go back to the beginning, in January 2023. (Yay, anniversary post!) I was 41 and dealing with a lot of recent loss I didn’t yet understand or process. I didn’t have a roadmap out of the grief of so many simultaneous endings – a life-defining professional project, a life-defining relationship, and, soon after, moving out of a life-defining apartment. The most important chapter of my life was closing, and I had done enough living to understand that one would not begin the very next day. A “neutral zone” would follow: searching, trying, pondering, exploring, enjoying, sometimes just surviving.
This is why the name felt apt. This is from my opening letter: “[I’m in my 40s], and it’s also the name of a book very dear to me (Draft No. 4), because it talks about nonfiction writing as a craft of building, rebuilding, trying, discarding. It’s about writing as intentional labor. That's not how it is for everybody, but it’s how it’s always been for me.”
To me, these letters are tools to understand the changes in my chosen profession – journalism –, explorations of changes in identity, and the stories we spin to give meaning to both. These include the stories journalism tells about the world and the industry, but also the ones we tell ourselves about who we are at a certain point in time, how we change, how our communities change, and where we go from here.
More practically, for the last couple of years I’ve written about what journalism (in Romania and beyond) could do better, but also about the struggles of figuring out my role in this changing landscape – as an introverted recovering perfectionist, as a 40-something insecure overachieving man in Eastern Europe, as an initiator of projects who’s also worried about his capacity for maintaining and leading them.
If you’re Romanian, why is this in English?
I often feel I'm freer thinking/writing in English. It's a second language, and a second self to some degree.
So, who are you?
I’m a storyteller, editor, and coach based in Bucharest, Romania. I’m currently the chair of the European Press Prize Preparatory Committee and the host of The Power of Storytelling conference. For 13 years, I ran DoR, a digital and print magazine that was an important landmark for Romanian independent journalism until it closed in late 2022. My more than two-decades-long career has taken me from Romania to the U.S., and back.
In 2020, DoR won the European Press Prize Innovation award, the culmination of a series of experiments it was known for: from launching new products, business models, and formats, to bringing journalism on stage, to creating community.
I’m a 2014 Nieman Fellow and part of the 2024 CUNY News Innovation and Leadership cohort.
These days I write this newsletter, coach young journalists, consult local and regional newsrooms, and still believe well-crafted true stories can connect people, heal wounds, inspire, lead, and create change.
