Begin new voice now

Writing about starting to write again. And something about a bear.

Bear 747 (National Park Service photo), Katmai National Park and Preserve, August 29, 2019. Photo via Flickr.

When it comes to writing, I’ve long seen myself as more of a workhorse than an artist. And I’ve been proud of that. You sit down and produce the words, right? You get your coffee, and off you go.

I even have a slide in one of my lectures about countering writer’s block. I quote, as one must, John McPhee’s classic words in the New Yorker about getting past it — using the hypothetical example of trying to write about a grizzly bear. McPhee’s advice is to write a long letter to your mother, detailing how hard it has been to write about the bear (and naturally including, along the way, some details about the bear). Then, says McPhee, “you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”

I claim this advice for the workhorse writer school. Just get some words down the first time, McPhee is telling us. It gets easier from there.

All of which makes it almost confessional that, after a recent career transition from journalism into academia and teaching, I’ve found it … complex to start writing again. I have plenty of words written down. But who’s saying them?

The last thing I published of note was this. It’s my last article from ~ 10 years at the Washington Post, about sea level rise, erosion, and oceanfront construction in Galveston, Texas. I am very proud of it. But it was a gigantic multimedia data journalism collaboration, and could not have been completed without the work of many — not just this one. And I just don’t know that I’ll be writing in quite this way now, at least not on this account.

And there have been excuses. I’ve been busy teaching. There are classes to prepare and grading. So many emails.

Enough: Begin new voice now. I have a lot that I want to say from a combined journalist-academic perspective. It’s different from how I expressed myself (or, did not express myself) when I was working solely as a reporter.

My subject, as ever, is climate science, its communication, and its coverage in journalism, especially data journalism. I’ll offer some data-driven journalism itself, but also advice, critiques, visuals, and perspective on the field and where it is going. If you knew me before, I hope you’ll find I still have a valuable take, if a bit distinct.

Oh, and I’m sorry I left in what McPhee would call the “whimpering and whining.” You can find, in the last two paragraphs, the bear.