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When I started working here, posting her column every week and formatting the pictures, I had to pay attention to it. And I realized I liked it: despite my above-all-things love for classical L7 literary journalism, I liked it a lot. Or, perhaps, because it’s part of that august tradition. As she wrote in her valedictory column, “I loved this job. I loved being paid to explore my city and talk to people who do whatever the fuck they want, and maybe inspire others to do the same.”
Let me explain what I think she’s getting at with “people who do whatever the fuck they want,” since I don’t think she did herself justice.
“The idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. . . . They are the writings of a reporter emancipated from the assignment book and the copy-desk; a reporter gone to the heaven of reporters, where they write what they jolly well please and get it printed too!”
She picked a difficult and worthy project for herself and produced a number of fascinating, wholly alive miniatures from a vital but neglected aspect of our city while developing a compelling voice of her own. I cannot emphasize enough how difficult that is to do, and how grateful I am that people still try.
