Why I Write for ELi

Photo: Telaina Morse and husband-to-be Andrew Eriksen at her graduation from MSU, June 1990

When I was 17 or 18, I told my mother I wanted to be an English major. My mother then asked if I wanted to teach high school. I responded I didn’t think so, and she asked the dreaded question “So what are you going to DO with an English degree?” I thought about it for a few minutes and I said, “Well, I could be a journalism major.” My mother’s face relaxed. Her younger brother (before dying of cancer at a very young age) had worked as a journalist in New Jersey. He had been able to support himself and had been published in a newspaper almost daily. This was ideal to my mother. My parents lived paycheck to paycheck (to be honest, we almost never made it all the way to the next paycheck) and getting “a good job” was to her, the sole purpose of a four-year college degree.

I attended Michigan State University from 1986 to 1990. At the time, MSU had one of the best Journalism Schools in the country. I learned about fact-checking, news and the law, reporting on public affairs, the history of journalism, its ethics, and how to write a good lede. For every fact error, three full points were deducted from your graded story. So if your news story had been a 4.0 story, with a fact error, it immediately went to a 1.0. Fact errors included the misspelling of names. I once forgot to put the apostrophe between the d and the s in McDonald’s and failed a story. For each typo or AP style error, a quarter of a point was deducted from your story’s grade. I learned to write quickly and accurately. I enjoyed my journalism classes (and took a lot of English classes both toward my degree and on the sly).

My first job out of college was writing technical documentation for an educational software company, and I eventually did a variety of jobs there, most of them very writing heavy—press releases, brochures, newsletters. I went back to school for my MFA in Creative Writing, and in a circle of life worthy of The Lion King, I now teach in the English Department at Michigan State. Like most people, I’m pretty busy. I work (both teaching and writing creatively and professionally for other venues), I’m a parent, until last month I was on the board of three nonprofits (now I’m down to two). I have a house to help take care of, and two geriatric dogs who I think are more time-consuming than my own kids when they were toddlers. And I have other commitments, both fun and not-so fun.

When Alice first talked to me about ELi, she knew about my journalism background and asked how much I wanted to be involved. I said I would write for ELi when I could. I admit to having second thoughts. More things to do, I thought, great. The more I got involved, the more I realized that ELi’s model was perhaps the only sustainable model of local news and reporting that was possible given how much media is now controlled by corporations who, let’s face it, exist for one reason and one reason only—to make money. I realized that I was involved in the future of news and of community in a very real way. Communities are going to have to take their news into their own hands, and not depend on others to give it to them. Unfortunately, news and features don’t seem that important to most corporations—it’s all about the revenue and the bottom line, not about delivering services to a community. (I’m not insinuating that there is anything wrong with making money, but can any service really be expected to experience constant growth for their stockholders forever and ever and ever?)

My husband and I have a subscription to the Lansing State Journal. Some of the best people I know work there. I have the utmost respect for their reporters and other employees and professionals, working in their community and doing the best they can with the limited time, budgets, personnel and the strain of “being profitable.” And I believe any community is vastly enriched by having more than one news source.

I get paid for what I write at ELi. (I donate it all back to ELi during their fundraising campaigns.) But I accept that check and I think that check is important both for me and the other writers and editors. That little check tells us that what we do is important, it is work, and it should be acknowledged as such.

East Lansing was my first chosen home as a college student and East Lansing has been my family’s home for last thirteen years. I have enjoyed learning more about East Lansing by writing for ELi. I write about high school music and sports because I have a high schooler and those are pretty easy things for me to write about. But I have also written about Helping Hands Respite Care, ReMark Clothing, shows at MSU, and features on businesses in East Lansing.

I wanted to be an English major, but now here in my middle-age, I wonder if it all doesn’t manage to work out. As I’ve dusted off my journalistic training for ELi, it’s made me think of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (one of the most misunderstood poems of the English language). “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/And sorry I could not travel both… Then took the other as just as fair/and having perhaps the better claim,/Because it was grassy and wanted wear;/Though as for the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.” (The two roads were basically the same, no matter what your high school English teacher told you, or what you read on that Hallmark card.)

I’m glad this path, and my journalistic training, has enabled me to be a part of the special-something that is East Lansing Info. 

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