I spent a very miserable year as a middle-school English teacher in South Mississippi the year after I graduated from college. It was miserable for a lot of reasons: the chronic underfunding of Mississippi public schools, for example, and the fact that I was bizarrely expected to keep my class quiet at lunch time, the only time (I thought) that they should have been allowed to talk freely all day. But it was mostly miserable because I wasn’t writing and because I wasn’t living in Jackson.
In February of my first year, my then-boss asked me if I wanted to take a more active role in the leadership of the English department during the next school year. Unprofessionally, I replied, “Oh, I most definitely won’t be here next year.” I wasn’t: I moved back to Jackson and accepted a job at my alma mater as an enrollment verification specialist in the Registrar’s Office. Nate Schumann and I had been lab partners in high school, and he waited about three minutes after I moved back before asking me if I’d be interested in writing some columns and other articles for the Jackson Free Press, where he was an editor before he moved to the Mississippi Free Press as the two publications merged over time.
The pandemic had descended, and so I filled my non-working hours with phone interviews. One year, I wrote the entirety of the “Guys We Love” section; another, I wrote more than half of the Best of Jackson blurbs. Later, when the MFP acquired the JFP, I wrote articles for them, too, even writing the obituaries of Cora Norman and Elise Winter. Eventually, I was promoted at my day job and began adjuncting college composition courses, so I took a step back from the articles I’d been churning out pretty steadily for the two and a half years prior.
Nate and Editor Donna Ladd never let me get away completely, though, eventually bringing me back in to edit the work of young writers during last summer’s Youth Media Project for their website and a digital flipbook on better media coverage of elections. It was some of the most fun I’d ever had professionally: I coached developing writers through multiple drafts and revisions (which my college English professor Steve Price would say is all good writing really is in the first place), and I spent Friday afternoons in the newsroom in downtown Jackson. There our high-school staffers taught me the phrase “clocked that tea” and made a Pic-Stitch of Donna and me editing their work in the exact same position in different rooms.
At the end of the summer, I prepared to change day jobs, taking the assistant registrar job at Millsaps College, and Donna asked if I’d also be willing to stay on and do contract editing for MFP. I was, and so I worked with News Editor Ashton Pittman to turn out all of our election week coverage and collaborated with Publisher Kimberly Griffin on documents for fundraising campaigns. And now here I am again, this time as the new Calendar Editor, making sure that Mississippians know how many fun and interesting things are going on all across the Magnolia State. (I could have used the calendar myself when I was living in rural southeast Mississippi in that terrible year after college, desperate for things to do!)
I love being a tourist in my own home state. Over MLK weekend, my friend Deirdre and I took the Emmett Till Driving Tour through the Delta; this past summer, some of my neighbors and I visited Meridian to see the MAX and take in a show at the Riley Center. And I’m perpetually a tourist in my chosen-hometown, often trying new Jackson restaurants the week they open and making sure to buy season tickets to New Stage every year. As calendar editor, I want to hear about the things you love and make sure they get the coverage they deserve; you can email me about those goings-on at events@mississippifreepress.org.
All that to say, this part-time gig feels like a logical progression for me and a way to continue to be involved with a publication that’s meant a lot to me as a professional adult. If you can, please give to the MFP today. Support nonprofit media with deep roots in Mississippi and needed journalism here.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
