During the decade Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent writing and researching her opus Random Family, she slept on cockroach-infested couches, spent time in some of New York’s most dangerous neighborhoods, filled hundreds of reporter’s notebooks with detail, and transcribed more than a thousand of hours of taped interviews. In the process, she lost her savings, her sanity and her relationships.How did she persevere? It’s a question I’ve harbored since reading the book and one I was determined to ask during a recent workshop LeBlanc held at the University of Oregon.
During the three-day workshop, however, I got the answer without ever having to pose the question. LeBlanc is a dynamo. If life is measured on a scale of one to 10, she is at 25. Being around her is like plugging your body into an electrical outlet, you literally pulse with energy. That vitality comes, I believe, from something much stronger than hormones or coffee. It comes from passion.
If you’re in journalism for the money, you’re in the wrong business, LeBlanc told the workshoppers. The advance she earned for a decade’s worth of work on Random Family was a pittance. After subtracting taxes and her agent’s commission, it amounted to the equivalent of a year’s salary for an entry-level fast food worker. This work needs to be your passion. LeBlanc, who is the product of a labor activist father and a mother who worked at a drug treatment center, naturally gravitated toward stories of social injustice and inequity. “I was raised to think you should make use of yourself. So in my sense, something useful is to make things better,” she told me that weekend. It was that belief in her work, that passion for her project that wrote Random Family.
Even in this age of instant messages and 24-hour news, it’s the longer stories on which journalists labored intensely and invested of themselves emotionally that truly make a difference, that make things better.
“Take all the time you need to write the piece you care about because it will live on,” LeBlanc told an assembly of writers, students and faculty at the University of Oregon.
That is the true reward of a journalist’s work.
For more from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, read the interview in this spring's Etude (etude.uoregon.edu).
2 comments:
Your interview with LeBlanc sounds amazing. It's so true what you took away from her speech, that you really have to be passionate about the subject. Writers are such interesting people, but sometimes they seem almost too introspective. I can see from what you've written that LeBlanc comes across with so much energy, it's contagious. We should all be more like her. And congrats on getting the interview!
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