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S
AN ENGLISH MAJOR AT UMASS AMHERST, I was subjected to the inevitable question
every English major has to face from members of less employment-challenged
fields such as business and engineering.
"What do you plan to do with a degree in English?" the computer
programmers of tomorrow would
ask. My answer would always be the same simple, one-word explanation: "Write."
In my days as a college student, writing
always conjured up images of a romantic, exciting life spent with a drink
in one hand and a pen in the other. While taking Don Junkins' Hemingway
course, I imagined traveling around the world, reinventing the English
language while recording my journeys. During Arthur Kinney's Faulkner course,
I would picture myself using flowing prose to redefine American culture.
Writing was not guaranteed to pay well, but it would be an adventure.
Four years after graduating UMass with
my degree in English and two years into a journalism career, I have found
that part of my half-baked fantasy of a writer's life is true. It isn't
guaranteed to pay well.
Currently
I am a full-time reporter for a small weekly newspaper chronicling the life
and times of Stow, Massachusetts. Stow is a fairly wealthy, rural community
of about 5,500, about twenty-five miles west of Boston and a million miles
from anywhere I envisioned myself four years after leaving college.
Contrary to what I feared when I took the job a year and a half ago, Stow
does have news to report. People are born, people die. The school committee
needs more money and the taxpayers aren't sure they can afford it. The
owner of a "problem" dog tearfully pleads before the Board of
Selectmen for his pet's right to stay in town. Stow has even had a small
gang-related incident on my watch. It sometimes seems like Stow exists
in a vacuum, but people here face the same daily grind people face everywhere
else.
I
n some ways, life in Stow reminds me of
what life in Amherst might be like without UMass. During slow news weeks,
loose cows may be the highlight of the police incident log. A housing development
that could potentially add 300 new residents over a five-year period worries
Stow-dwellers who fear losing the town's "historic rural character."
The one bar in town makes The Hatch look like Studio 54 and also functions
as a deli and grocery store.
In defense of Stow (and Amherst locals who always moaned about how much
better Amberst would have been without us college kids), there are positives
to quiet, small-town life. Everyone in town seems to be on a first-name
basis with everyone else. The rolling country roads make for a relaxing,
scenic drive. And many city dwellers would gladly have their local police
shooing cows off the road rather than crack dealers off the corner. I have
come to appreciate Stow the way I came to appreciate Amherst during summer
apartment-hunting excursions.
Much as I looked forward to graduating
from UMass and getting into the "real world," I look forward
to "graduating" from this job and going on to writing about larger,
more colorful topics. If things go according to plan, someday soon I will
move on to a writing job with parameters beyond the Stow Colonial Harvest
Parade.
Then again, if things had gone according to plan, you would be reading
my Great American Novel by now. Or at least my Good American Paperback.
-illustration by Cynthia Fisher
