Draft Four: Why I Do What I Do

An essay from 11 years ago, when I first took on the question.

This weekend I spoke at a TEDx Youth event organized by teenagers in Pitești. What I focused on is the idea that their lives will be a series of ups and downs, because it’s how we tell ourselves stories. You are on top of the world one day, in a dark place the next.

One thing I brought up is how I almost got kicked out of high school. It’s one of those “core memories” for me, one that has everything to do with becoming the journalist I am.

This TED talk and a recent conversation with a friend about Amanda Palmer reminded me of an essay I wrote at the end of 2013, almost 11 years ago. It’s one I delivered to my Nieman class of 2014, as part of a series when each of us talked about why we did what we did.

It’s an edited version of that 2013 essays you’ll read below.

Re-reading it today, I see what’s changed, but also how much has stayed the same – both in the Romanian media landscape, and in my belief that stories have special powers over us.

I hope it helps you remember why you do what you do, and why it matters.

***

The story of why I became a journalist has something to do with my first kiss.

I was in ninth grade, not yet fourteen, and I sometimes joined a couple of older friends on their nights out at the local disco, hoping that maybe, one day, I could work up the courage to ask a girl to dance.

I was shy, scared of the older boys that often started fights in the club, and I always had to squint at the dark and smoky dance floor to see whether there were any girls I could dance with. I never asked though, and even if I did, I could think of no other conversation starter than “come here often?”, and “do you have the time?”

On that Spring night in the mid-1990s, as another round of slow songs came on, a girl in a group I was observing came up to me and asked me to dance. I believe the song playing was George Michael’s Jesus to a Child. My voice was gone, but, luckily, she liked to talk. She asked me my sign (Gemini), she told me hers (Taurus), asked my name, and who knows what else, and at the end of the song, she kissed me. With tongue. Carmen – that was her name – then asked me for my number. She lived in a high school dorm, so she had to use the lobby pay phone, and said she’d call me at night.

It was because of Carmen that I didn’t unplug the landline at our house, something I had been doing for a few weeks at that time. Now it could ring again, and if it did, it could be either Carmen, my first kiss, or the school nurse, who desperately wanted to talk to my parents.

The school nurse was worried about my illnesses, the many types of flus that appeared on the medical certificates she had to approve so I would get a pardon for missed classes. She wanted to ask my parents and see if I was OK, because the certificates didn’t indicate that.

I wasn’t OK. But it had little to do with the certificates, which I forged. Of course my parents didn’t know any of this, and I was terrified they might find out what I’d been up to.

Since ninth grade began, I had started skipping classes, something I never did in primary school. I began by skipping one here and there, and soon it was whole days, then weeks. I would leave the house in the morning, hide somewhere around my building until my parents left for work, then I’d go back home and read. Sometimes it was sci-fi by people I loved, like Asimov or Herbert, other times it was nationalistic conspiracy thrillers or my mother’s Sandra Brown books.

I began skipping class because I was afraid, then I skipped because I was ashamed, and eventually it became almost like an addiction.

When the phone rang that Sunday night, and my parents picked up, it wasn’t Carmen. The nurse had beat her to it.

We huddled in the kitchen after the call, my parents and their record-breaking son – nobody in recent high school history had skipped as many classes as I had. I’d never seen either of them so disappointed. The kids of working class families, they were both first generation doctors who worked long hours to create a better life for me and my brother. My father owned one pair of pants through high school which my grandmother, who quit her secretarial job to be a full-time mother, used to patch up often. My mother often endured her punishments at home by kneeling in a corner, on cracked walnut shells. When she failed her first entrance to medical school, she scrubbed labels off water bottles at a local bottling plant

My parents dreamed that me or my younger brother would follow them into the medical profession, maybe even create a dynasty, like others in our Transylvanian town. Even if we didn’t do this, I know they wished we wouldn’t fail.

I had. I barely passed my high school entrance exam, and now I was maybe days away from being kicked out. They didn’t yell at me, but all life seemed to have drained from their faces.

They asked “why”, and I didn’t know what to say, or how to explain it, because I myself didn’t understand it. The short version was that I was scared of going to school. Something had happened when I started ninth grade, and the new crop of students and teachers terrified me.

My heart raced so fast when I was called on to speak that I couldn’t articulate a word. Sometimes I could stutter my way through a sentence, but shame at doing so would overwhelm me, and I’d shut up again. In several instances, I had trouble pronouncing my own name. Once, the biology teacher called me stupid and useless, before telling me to sit down and giving me a 3. The math teacher, who was also our class master, said I was a spoiled brat, told me I look like “death on a holiday”, and predicted I would never amount to more than a toilet cleaner.

I didn’t have a voice, I felt ashamed, I felt alone. I didn’t know if my parents really understood, but they seemed to try.

***

The nurse’s call did interrupt this vicious cycle. My parents were now watching, and that helped me go back to school. It wasn’t always easy, I still had nightmares about math class, I still stumbled, but I persevered. That summer, I even went on the high school’s summer camp trip, so I could be part of the school life. Emboldened by my father, me and Ciprian, a friend from school, created a camp paper, which was actually a bulletin board we’d write, cut, glue, and tape to the windows of the camp dining hall. It carried the day’s gossip, announcements, jokes, and other trivia, and it was done by hand.

One of the seniors I met on that trip suggested we do something similar when we returned to school. It didn’t seem like a bad idea, and I thought it would help me save some face with the high school I dreaded. Maybe it would even make me less shy. We called it The Voice, and it began as a weekly two-sided sheet – within a few issues it had gone up to 4, sometimes 8 pages. I’d do most of the writing – tackling school policy, tests, cheating, love stories, proms etc., Ciprian would do the design, and we’d make 100 copies, which my mother and I would fold by hand on Sunday night, while watching television.

We did it for two years, completely independent from school, and by the time we stopped, 60 issues later, we were up to 32 pages, we had seen the principal’s office many times, and we had a few hundred loyal readers, and a slew of contributors.

***

It had become clear by then that I wasn’t going to follow my parents into medicine, so I settled on journalism. I didn’t know what journalism was, what it was for, or if what I was doing could even qualify, but the high school paper gave me a voice.

I could write something, people would read it, and they’d walk up to me to discuss it. Being able to speak felt good. At that time, all national newspapers had front page opinion columns by the country’s great newspaper men – I wanted to become one of them.

In 1999, I got into journalism school and moved to Bucharest, knowing two things about me: I loved to read and write, and I was anxious. The fact that my apartment was broken into three weeks after I moved there, or that I was robed downtown a year later didn’t help. I found refuge from the unwelcoming city in a website I started in 2000 with Adi, my university buddy. This was before blogs, but the freedom of the digital space was our ethos – young people writing under pen names, sounding off on anything, from alternative rock, to book reviews, to the broken politics of pre-EU Romania. Sometimes we sounded like The Onion, other times like an emo message board.

I also read a lot of fiction, anything from Tolkien to Marquez to Roth, looking for a signal that there was place in the world for whatever I had to say. When I learned that Henry Miller began writing for real at 33, I was relieved. Back then I had more than a decade to go. “We read to know we are not alone” the saying goes, and it’s part of what I did those years in my studio in Bucharest – finding a place in the world through the characters I’d follow.

In my junior year I became part of a year-long program taught by American journalists, all working and teaching in Romania. They were the first ones to do something the school hadn’t done – actually make us go out into the street and report. Together with our class we produced a student newspaper, which we called The Bullet. The tagline said it all: “shooting down the news for students”.

That program showed me a different side of journalism, done from the street, not from the gut. This made me want to understand more about journalism done not through raising your own voice, but through letting the voices of others come through. That’s why I applied for a master’s, and that’s how I got to the Missouri School of Journalism. (Columbia in New York rightfully rejected me; I knew nothing about the world, and I believe I answered the question: “What is Al-Jazeera?” by writing: a terrorist network).

***

In the two years I spent at Missouri, and then another two I spent working in Washington, D.C., and Boston, I learned the type of journalism I wanted to pursue. Moreover, I learned how to make journalism that was both relevant and interesting, and, most importantly, how to get my work to follow the guidelines I tried to live by – all listed in a book that back than was my bible. It’s called The Elements of Journalism.

The United States was not the land of milk and honey. It was far from the meritocracy we outsiders sometimes project – an editor at the New York Times told me he will always hire a Harvard graduate over a state school graduate; a magazine editor told me it’s hard to get a story accepted unless you go to the right parties; in 2006, one of my editors rejected three of my pitches on this hot new thing called YouTube because she said she found it irrelevant and silly.

I still dreaded speaking to strangers, making phone calls, or showing up to large gatherings without knowing anybody, but I accepted my vulnerabilities and tried to turn them into strengths.

Much of the fault lies with This American Life. I remember my editor at The Missourian pestering me to listen to it, and one of the first episodes I heard was called Recordings for Someone. One of the stories on that show is a recording a college student with a stutter makes for the pizza delivery place he always calls, and which rarely is patient with him. I didn’t face the same difficulties he did, not by far, but the edited recording, clean and crisp, made me cry.

I discovered narrative journalism, and I began doing my first stories that required spending a lot of time with people. For my master’s project I spent five months reporting on the Columbia, Missouri Muslim community. In the end we ran a 20-page special section that also had three short profiles – a surgeon who late one night in his apartment explained the existence of God to me by scribbling equations in my notebook, an unbelievable young college student named Rehab, who wore a hijab, and every Sunday morning taught young girls how to write letters to the editor, and become better citizens, and Caleb, who converted because he liked Malcolm X, and because a girl broke his heart. The night I spent with him and his friend, smoking hukkah, eating figs, and playing video games – and stopping for prayer at 5 AM – was one of the best in my life.

I liked this kind of journalism so much that I wrote in my weekly report to my master’s committee that I had found a personal definition for it, a work in progress, but it worked for me: “journalism is the ability and the opportunity to share stories of the world and the people in it with those around you.”

I later stumbled upon the quote that remains my guiding principle in the work I do as a writer and editor. It’s by Joan Didion, and it says: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”.

Not a bad way to spend one’s life.

The only problem was: where could I do this? Or better yet (and harder to answer), where would this be more helpful? These are the questions that haunted me when I arrived in Boston in 2006 ago to write for the Christian Science Monitor.

***

I came to the Monitor to do features, and it was a lonely job. I had to be at work at around 6:30 AM, and had to leave by 4PM as they didn’t want to have to pay me overtime. I wrote about the best toy of the year, the rise of Facebook, and vending machine innovation. The Church’s beliefs also subtly influenced the content. A colleague and I had a contest to see who could slip medical terms into stories and he scored big one day by writing in “aspirin”. One of my editors had a saying he repeated over and over: bang the nut, he said. Bang the nut. Ages were always taken out of my stories because, an editor told me: “Age is irrelevant to the infinity of the human being”.

Which is partly why I spent my nights in my apartment reading books with titles like The Return of the Hooligan, The Future of Nostalgia, or Indecision, contemplating returning to Romania to do the kind of journalism I was reading in my favorite magazines, such as The New Yorker, Esquire or The NY Times Magazine.

My mother, an oncologist, was very sick at the time. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer in late 2004, and although she got the required surgery and radiation therapy, the cancer eventually spread to her lungs, and by the fall of 2006 she had trouble breathing and moving around.

Not being with her added to my torment, but I knew she didn’t want me back in Romania, which she saw as a graveyard for a successful professional life. During many nights, I replayed in my head a conversation I once had with Bill Kovach, one of my idols, and a former Nieman curator, who had been my boss in Washington, D.C. Bill had covered the American civil rights movement, worked for the New York Times, had at one point been called “the conscience of American journalism”, and was one of the authors of The Elements of Journalism. We were driving from D.C. to Pittsburgh for a training, and I asked him the question that bugged me the most:

Should I stay in the US, where, for better or worse, journalism has some established standards and guidelines, and become a good professional, or should I return to Romania, where there are no common standards, where my growth will be erratic, but where I can contribute to creating a better culture for the work?

Part of me hoped he’d tell me to stay, to enjoy the process of growing as a writer and reporter and take advantage of the relative tranquility and predictability of American life. But he didn’t. Bill didn’t even bother to be as polite as most Americans are – his Albanian roots are probably to blame. He more or less told me to go back home and do something.

***

What sealed the deal was a night in Cambridge, in December 2006.

It happened not far from the Nieman house, at the Oberon theater, where I went to see a show called The Onion Cellar. The show was created by Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, a local artist who began her career by performing in Harvard Square and had become the creative force of a punk-cabaret duo. The idea was taken from Gunther Grass’ The Tin Drum, in which there is this odd bar where locals gather. There was no menu, and the owner had a ritual: He handed out cutting boards, paring knives, and then he would hand each person an ordinary onion. At his sign, the customers would peel, and their eyes would begin to water.

“What did the onion juice do?”, Grass writes. “It did what the world and the sorrows of the world could not do: it brought forth a round, human tear. It made them cry. At last they were able to cry again. To cry properly, without restraint, to cry like mad. The tears flowed and washed everything away.”

This is what the Dolls tried that night, and as the show ended and the band launched into the song that encompassed the night, a bunch of people started handing out notes to all patrons. Mine read: “If you could change your job, what would you do instead?”

***

In late March of 2007, I was back in Romania.

My mother died a month after my return, and two of those weeks were spent in crisis after crisis. The lack of direction and sadness that followed were oddly sprinkled with a bizarre hope that something good had to come next. I didn’t want to stay in my hometown in Transylvania, so I returned to Bucharest.

I got a job for what was supposed to be Foreign Policy magazine, but the media company, at that time owned by an oil-tycoon, was in no hurry to launch, so they kept the future staff busy with translating foreign news. When a friend told me Esquire Romania was about to start and was looking for people, I jumped at the chance.

I got the job of senior editor, which I still believe was completely ridiculous for a 26-year-old. This is the good and the bad news about working in a media culture with low standards, and little history. Pretty much anybody can hold a fancy position, but that is also great, if your intentions are to infiltrate a broken system, and make it better.

My job at Esquire was to write feature stories and find contributors. My first story was a posthumous profile an amazing 27-year-old movie director, Cristian Nemescu, who had died the year before, when a reckless driver slammed his Porsche into the taxi the director was in, returning from a screening of Superman Returns. His family told me that many journalists had written about him, but that none had come to listen. He was their only child, born late, and gone too soon. Sitting in their son’s room, I listened as best as I could.

I hard a harder time finding other writers. Many of the names on the market, some considered talented writers, didn’t really want to put too much effort in the reporting, and I couldn’t take the constant fighting over them refusing to be edited. They wanted to write opinion, and loved hearing their own voice, but had little else to offer the reader. Most disturbingly, they thought that putting so much work into a story was pointless – “Romanians didn’t read, they were stupid, why bother”?

My bosses weren’t that much better. One didn’t see a problem changing quotes or making up letters to the magazine – “nobody will know”. Another rarely decided anything before making sure he wouldn’t annoy the advertising department. I soon became a caricature – the naïve guy with the weird hangups about “standards”.

***

To be less alone, I decided to do two things. I failed miserably at the first one, which was talking to the University of Bucharest’s J-School (where I got my BA) to ask them whether we could work together on translating and teaching The Elements of Journalism. The dean at the time, who used to work on the Communist Party’s student paper, told me it was American propaganda. The second thing was to try and teach, even though I dreaded standing in front of a class. In October of 2007, I started a 12-week course called Narrative Journalism with about 20 people, most of them in their mid-20s, some already reporting and writing, others still students.

I didn’t have enough work experience or teaching knowledge, so I built the class around reading and discussing narrative pieces that had influenced me as a reader and as a writer – from The Long Fall of One Eleven Heavy, to The Falling Man. In those 12-weeks, the class also had to write a personal essay, something we didn’t do in that part of the world, and report and write a feature story. I ended up publishing two or three of those pieces in Esquire, and many of the people that went through that class became regular contributors. Some were 21 and 22-year-olds, still in college.

***

I taught a few more of these classes so I could find writers that liked going out into the field, spending time listening to people, gathering documents, observing, writing. Some fell in love with the form, and I learned an important lesson: no matter how odd your passions in journalism might be, there are people who share them. You are not alone.

Out of the more than a hundred people I worked with, maybe a dozen started taking it seriously, another dozen became devoted consumers of this work, and there certainly was a group that thought this was bullshit, not uncommon in a former Communist country where trust is in short supply, and where telling intimate stories of people is seem as irrelevant.

Why would anybody let their guard down when danger was everywhere?

I quit Esquire at some point because I burned out, and because I felt that the company didn’t understand the value of the stories it was publishing, nor the audience it found for them.

I didn’t want to do missionary work. Back then, all I dreamed of was to work for a place where I could write and edit stories about the people and events that shaped modern day Romania. I did believe stories could change our hearts and minds – they changed mine –, and that they could make us more empathetic and less alone. And I knew this was a hard sell, especially in a media company: be vulnerable, admit to your fears, admit that you don’t know everything, be humble, embrace uncertainty, and stop passing judgement on everything.

***

This is how DoR came about: on April 23, 2009, me and three other journalists went to hear a talk by Raymond Bobar, Esquire Romania’s former art director, a talented guy who also took his professional standards from somewhere else, mostly from the German school of editorial design. He had also quit the magazine, was happy, and enjoyed spending two hours thrashing the design of a slew of publications, including the ones we worked for at the time: they were sloppy, uneven, and lacked vision.

Afterwards, slightly depressed, we went to get a drink. Many drinks, to be more precise. We started bitching about our employers, their lack of vision, their inability to understand that more resources don’t necessarily mean better quality, and, more importantly, their inability to understand that little money doesn’t justify producing crap.

About five beers later we started joking about making our own magazine, one that would run the kinds of stories we wanted to read. These nights are familiar to journalists: you plan for the moon, wake up with a headache, then shuffle back to what you used to do.

The morning after, I sent an email saying we can’t afford to let this idea die.

We decided to do it one time, enough to show our bosses that it’s not just about resources, that quality is also about allowing good professionals to do the work they aspire to do. We also believed we’d find enough people to read it. We worked for six months on the pilot, enlisting Ray to do the design. We spent our own money for phones and travel and worked on the stories at night or during the weekends. In that pilot issue we wrote about magic, diacritical marks, internet-community, and the intersection of politics, protests and pot. We decided to print 1,500 copies and give them away for free, and we found a PR agency willing to foot the 4,000 Euros bill without asking for anything in return. I was ready to spend the wedding fund my father gave me, if all else failed.

We then announced a launch in Control, a downtown club, and we expected to have maybe a hundred people – contributors and their friends. More than 500 showed up, and we ended up signing autographs – which will remain the highlight of our professional careers.

After a hundred or so really thoughtful emails that gave us feedback we decided this needed to continue. Lavinia and I quit our jobs, and we set out to work. Nobody was paid, and all the funds we were able to raise went to printing the magazine. Our bet was that people longed for content that reflected their dreams, fears, joys and tragedies, and that they’d be surprised to find them in personal essays and reported narratives that transported them deep into the life of another human being.

What we didn’t expect is that it meant so much to them, that they’d offer to help.

A young lawyer offered us a room in her office and helped us establish ourselves as an NGO. An advertising firm gave us furniture. Dozens of people donated their time to produce content – stories, illustrations, photographs etc. All we could give back was our gratitude, our love, and the tremendous joy of having built something. We built a community not just of professionals, but also of readers. Social media – Facebook more precisely – , was a tremendously important (and cheap) channel for communication. We were transparent not just with the journalism, but with everything we did around the magazine: from our story meetings, to our birthday parties, to what happened at the printer’s.

Those of us that took care of everything were so tired after four issues that we wanted to stop. Our art director got a job abroad and left for better pay, and an easier life. But instead of quitting we decided to go bigger – two other people quit their jobs, and we moved into a real office. We started to pay ourselves a minimum wage, and the magazine’s content started getting better. This was 2011, and we began winning awards – we actually cleaned up at a competition that fall, and, soon after, organized the first edition of The Power of Storytelling narrative journalism conference.

We started the conference because we wanted to share the joy, craft, and purpose of storytelling with other journalists, but also with our readers. We also did it because we needed to be reminded that we were not crazy, and that we were not alone.

I need that yearly reminder because not all fellow journalists cheered us on. On the contrary. Some said we did useless work, that our stories are long and formulaic, that this type of journalism is crap, and that we’re not changing the world one bit. We aren’t attacking the government, we aren’t exposing corruption, we aren’t screaming and waving our fingers at botched privatizations. One journalist came up to me in a club once during the launch of one of our issues saying: „I will defeat you, Cristian Lupșa.”

I don’t think his remark was any kind of professional jealousy, but I do think it has something to do with an inability to understand that if you really care about a slice of journalism, you can find people to consume what you do. We are so used to waiting for others to solve our discontents in that part of the world, that we are suspicious of anybody that builds something.

What he said, and what others have said, hurt me.

I haven’t been able to grow a thicker skin, and I have plenty of moments of doubt and sleepless nights when I feel I stopped growing as a reporter because I became a teacher, and an editor. I sometimes feel I stopped growing as a teacher and an editor, because I became a manager. There are times when I have no idea which of these actually fits best. But, even in my darkest days, I can’t deny we’ve built something, and that there are a few dozen young journalists in Romania now who work differently, think differently, and have crazy standards.

With DoR we continue to do stories of modern day Romania – in 2013 we wrote about prisoner re-integration, Paralympic sports, human rights education, Roma activism, and many more. We continue to struggle and have by no means figured out a business model. We are still far from paying our contributors – and there are about 60-70 to every issue. We’re up to issue #14, we now print 3,000 copies, and we’re read by about 10,000 people. We have 700 subscribers, a big number for Romania, but still small for most advertisers to care.

We might make it another year, we might not. But surviving was never the goal.

***

What I’ve learned in the past six years is that opening up will bring people closer. I’ve learned that it’s not all lost. I’ve learned that people still read, and people still care about good journalism. I’ve learned that it’s part of our responsibility to teach them about what we do and teach them to hold us accountable. I’ve learned that it matters, and that it can be done.

I also learned that countries like mine change slow, that any political progress made today can be undone at the next election, that journalism there will never go through a golden age, that it might not get rid of corruption, it might not change healthcare or improve education, but just because one story can’t make it all good, doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

The stories we tell about our world and our lives are what bind us. They bring hope where before there was fear, they bring joy where before there was pain.

I have felt this in my own life, and I have seen it in the lives of others.

This is why I keep going. Because stories can do that.

The song The Dresden Dolls played at the end of their Cambridge show in 2006 is called Sing, but it might as well be called Speak, or Write. It goes something like this:

Sing for the bartender, sing for the janitor, sing
Sing for the cameras, sing for the animals, sing
Sing for the children shooting children, sing
Sing for the teachers who told you that you couldn't sing
Just sing.

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