Frances Madeson sees herself as a “change agent,” and in her view change agents don’t effect enough change if they all stay in Manhattan. In 2010 she left New York City and moved back to Missouri, setting up shop in Farmington, a town of 16,000 about 60 miles south of Saint Louis. She ran a little business that provided writing services—resumes, cover letters, and in one case a letter for a woman who wanted to persuade her daughter to stop smoking pot. “A precondition to change is to restore language to people,” Madeson says.
Bring it back, she said to Madeson.
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Her first issue, in June, saluted the paper’s founder (PDF): back issues had impressed her with “how substantive and informative the articles were, and how incisive and daring the editorials. Big shoes to fill.”
Frances Madeson recalls the NDC as an exercise in “great courage, great daring, and failure, failure, failure.” After college she lived an east-coast life, working as a congressional aide in Washington and publishing a novel, Cooperative Village, in New York that was described by one reviewer as a “smart, macabre satire of the War on Terror.” But when her marriage ended she decided it was time to come home. And back in Missouri, her gift for fanciful writing fell flat.
“People around here generally don’t take the dark view of the military,” the superintendent replied.
Whitener turned to Facebook to disassociate herself from the present Crier. “I was as horrified as many of you were at the mockery of Caleb Killian in the last issue,” she wrote. “Those comments, along with those regarding the JROTC program, led me to assume that her intent was to encourage a discussion about defense spending, the thousands of soldiers killed and maimed in the wars of the last several years, to question what are our military objectives are, etc. However, I could not have been more disgusted at the manner in which she chose to present the issue.”
“My father, principled to his core, is my guide in death as he was in life,” she wrote. “He understood something about the honor of holding the minority opinion, and not just holding it but embodying it.”
