News To Me, Adventures of an Accidental Journalist is excellent. Really.

I've been reading Laurie Hertzel's blog for over three years, and in all that time I've hardly missed a post.

Why? Several reasons.
Laurie is a good cyber friend and I like to know what she's up to.
She has adorable dogs and I pounce on their news and photos.
She's American and I love the language, our differences and our inherent sameness.
But there is also a more selfish reason. Laurie is a damn fine writer and I'm fascinated by how she tells a story.
Because she's a journalist, Laurie's stories are factual. There's little embellishment which means you're always secure in the knowledge that you're getting the truth. She's never mean about people. She'll tell you just the right fact to help you get the entire picture about a person or a situation. And her narrative is riveting, whether she's writing about her childhood, her travels or her
neighbourhood. It's just all such good stuff.

So I was excited when Laurie wrote a memoir about her accidental fall into journalism and her career in newspapers which spans three decades.
And I asked her a few questions ...

Q. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the 'bygone era' - the sixties childhood, newspaper rooms run in the way you see in the old films with men in Fedoras, your trips to Russia during the Cold war era. Everything was changing and evolving. Now you look back, are you amazed by just how much the world has changed?

A. It's funny, for a time in my life I specialized in 'end of an era' stories, the tales of the last mom-and-pop resort, or the last full-service gas station, or the last one-room schoolhouse. I even wrote about the last cobbler in one small Minnesota town. I certainly didn't realize that I was living sort of my own 'end of an era' story. But the way that newspapers were when I started out in the mid-1970s is not the way it is at all anymore. It's not just the hats, those fedoras, that the guys used to wear. It's the way the wire news used to be delivered, machine-typed constantly on big rolls of paper, and the way the pages were still hand-pasted by compositors, who cut them out with exacto knives and pasted them to full-size dummy sheets
with hot wax. The way the photographs were printed up in the dark room, smelling of those strong, acrid chemicals, with that red light glowing. It all just sort of slipped away.

So part of this book is a record of those times.

And yes, the Soviet Union. I was there at the very end, just days before the fall. And the stories I told about the American Finns who immigrated to Russia to help build the Communist country back in the 1930s. Funny that while I was telling end of an era stories, I was also living one.

Q. And after that big question, are there things about the 'old' newspaper
rooms that you miss? I know that the world of newspapers today is a very,
very different affair.

A. Oh, I miss all of it, you know? It was a rather inefficient way of doing things, with those big old cameras and heavy camera bags, and sending stories back to the newsroom not by email, but by writing them down in a notebook and reading them over the telephone, and running copy back
to the composing room by hand. But it had such dash, such flair, it was such a busy and exciting place to work, with that great sense of urgency, all these people working in such close quarters, the copy desk just inches away from the city desk, which was within hollering range of the reporters' desks, and the police scanner crackling away, and the wire machine typing
furiously. Newsrooms today are much calmer and quieter places. I miss the noise. I miss the fun.

Q. Your childhood is fascinating to me because it couldn't be more different from my own. Did being one of ten children reinforce your independence? You may have fallen accidentally into journalism, but it was determination and persistence which carved your career.

A. My childhood was steeped in words and books and writing, the sound of my father's typewriter as he sat upstairs working on his articles for The Nation and Catholic Digest and North American Review. We took reading seriously in that house, and we took writing seriously, too. 'I'm reading' was a legitimate excuse to get out of a whole lot of chores. I used it frequently.
My father was an English professor, and my mother was a law librarian, and every year for Christmas and birthdays we got books, books, books. And clothes, of course, because that was the only way we were ever going to get new clothes; otherwise, it was hand-me-downs.

But growing up in a family that size, you do learn to kind of carve out your own space, your own identity, and make your own way. You can't wait for someone to help you because they're likely busy feeding the baby or digging around in the couch cushions for lunch money for an older sibling, or trying to cook dinner for twelve every night.

Q. You had (and still have)† an instinctive nose for a good story. What is it that draws you to something which you know will make great 'copy'?

A. I used to be drawn to melodramatic stories/weepers, you know. Lots of human emotion and drama. And over the years I've learned to appreciate nuance a little more, and pay a little more attention to what the story means than to all the action. And I am much more drawn to humor than I used to be. But for me a good story comes in the telling. It's all in how you
tell it.

Q. You write fiction too and have won awards including a prestigious prize judged by no other than Anne Tyler. Are you writing now? I really hope s0 (Repeat, Anne Tyler)

A. Fiction? Ah, no. I haven't written any fiction since I left Duluth. But I've been writing more personal essays, which I'm finding I really like. Many of them begin as blog posts, and then I take them and polish them and rework them and they find homes in other places. I've been thinking of my blog lately as sort of the first draft of my life.

Q.Toby, your beloved (but since departed) dog makes an appearance in the book and even has his photo on the back cover. And quite rightly so. But how do your dogs Boscoe and Riley feel about this? Have they made you promise they'll be in the next instalment of your memoirs? There will be a next instalment, won't there?

A. Ha! You've struck a nerve! Doug claims that Boscoe claims that my book would have been a best-seller, if it had just included a certain Border collie. But the book ends before he was born. There might not be a next installment (though you can always read about Boscoe and Riley on the blog). But there might be a prequel. I'm thinking. Of course, that wouldn't solve the dog problem, since they weren't around then either.


Thank you Laurie. It's a great slice of life - historically informative, funny and people rich. It's a book which made me go 'wow, I wouldn't have minded living that life. Wouldn't have minded at all.' And I bet I'm far from the only one who thinks that. Added to which, the writer has such great hair.

Laurie Hertzel is books editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Her blog is Three Dog Blog and her website is here

And most importantly her book, News to Me, Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, is available from Amazon.co.uk, in fact from any of the European Amazons as well as dot.com of course. Go check it out. You'll be pleased you did.