Lessons Learned: How I’ve reclaimed my faith in writing and why I’m back in the newsroom

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Kiera Ashcraft/The Occidental

The first time I was paid to publish, I was 17 being paid $75 per article at The Lamorinda Weekly. I wrote my 22nd and 23rd articles for them right after I graduated high school.

After my summer at Lamorinda Weekly, I left home in the Bay Area to study sociology and journalism on scholarship at Loyola University Chicago. I wrote my 24th and 25th articles there for The Loyola Phoenix, but that was the last time I published before writing for The Occidental this fall.

This summer, I checked in with a former teacher and mentor of mine. He happens to be a Jesuit priest, and it was in his class that my love for sociology and writing combined.

Our conversation this past summer turned into me telling him the story of how I’d gotten back into writing, and he asked me if I’d joined the school paper after I’d transferred. I had not.

I told him I’d found my first truly supportive writing community at The Oz, the Occidental literary magazine, and that I’d also found the creative writer within me. He told me he believed that one day, I could become a poet. Right now, that’s not my mountain, and I told him that. He asked me about journalism again.

“Why did you lose faith?” he said.

The contexts in which I did journalism had never been nurturing prior to at Occidental. In high school, I was editor-in-chief of my school paper and dealt with what I would consider to be extreme censorship from the school administration. My peers in the class affectionately referred to me as DWP — Drunk With Power — not only for my ability to handle the impropriety, but also for raising the standards of our magazine. I pushed all of us at The Page hard, and amidst the pandemic, we grew as writers.

My first time writing about a piece related to my interest in the arts, I took a story covering the red carpet debut of the Blumhouse horror movie “Black as Night” (2021) for the Loyola Phoenix. I turned the piece in to the senior editor, and he had me come into the newsroom — a 45-minute bus ride from the Lake Shore Campus to the Water Tower campus—so that he could tell me in person that I hadn’t written it right.

He said I must have misunderstood the assignment, that he hadn’t wanted me to be on the red carpet interviewing actor Keith David and writers Sherman Payne and Jay Walker about modern shifts in the horror genre or interviewing director Maritte Lee Go about why this film project had struck her heart more than any of her other film projects. The editor said that all he had wanted me to do was write a movie review.

That was the day I informally quit journalism in 2021.

I walked for a long time that night on the Chicago river path, passing the beautiful Chicago Tribune building, and I found myself dreading the struggles I imagined it would take to get there. I found my favorite spot on the river and checked The Page website.

I discovered that almost all of The Page issues and articles from the time that I was chief had been removed from online. My pertinacity had run its course.

Two years passed, and I transferred to Occidental. My third month in LA, a friend invited me to a book reading at North Figueroa Bookshop that her class was going to and, intrigued, I tagged along. Visiting Full Professor for the College Writing Program and three-time Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Robert Sipchen light-heartedly yet ruthlessly questioned  Los Angeles Times environmental reporter Rosanna Xia that night. I seriously questioned the pessimistic views about journalism I’d grown to believe.

I could see the positivity in their careers, in how ethically minded journalism can grow far beyond beginning struggles and into book writing, teaching and positive, fulfilling careers. I saw real life examples in Sipchen and Xia — I signed up to take a class with Sipchen the following semester, and I’m currently taking a class with him again.

In truth, my preferred style of writing shifted from from journalism to a more literary style during my hiatus, but I’ve found myself, after Sipchen’s class and after reading more narrative journalism, dabbling in narrative journalistic writing.

Thinking about writing is now what fills my school life. I work for the Writing Center tutoring students twice a week, and I try to pick up a story for The Occidental every or every other week. I’m taking two other College Writing Program classes in addition to Sipchen’s and considering applying to PhD programs in rhetoric one day.

While I still question my faith with journalism as an American institution, I no longer struggle alone, thinking about issues in the industry in and outside of class with friends. As I grow back into a role I once embraced, I will not let my past traumatic experiences hold me back — and I promise to never censor myself.

Contact Grace Gonsalves at gonsalves@oxy.edu

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