My top three stories, so far

By request, a blog post about some of my favorite stories I've covered as a reporter. It actually took me awhile to narrow it down. There have been several stories that have profoundly changed me, but most of them are pretty depressing, and I don't know if the word "favorite" is really appropriate. However, one story that does bear mentioning is the first fatality I ever covered. A seven-year-old boy named Nicholas Speights died on the Fourth of July. I remember thinking as I wrote that story, I would never have children because I knew I could never survive the pain Nicholas' family was enduring at that moment. But Bill and Cheryl Speights graciously allowed me to be a part of their healing and to continue writing about their extraordinary son. They taught me that even if a child's life ends much too soon, every single second of that life is worth it. This lesson weighed heavily in my decision to become a parent, and I'll never be able to thank them enough.(On a related note, if you're looking for a worthy charity to donate to, please consider the liveBIG Fund, which was founded by Nicholas' father to promote outdoor educational opportunities for kids and young adults with an emphasis on outdoor safety and awareness. http://www.livebigfund.org/Default.aspx)

Now for my list:

3) A feature article on the coroner

I undertook this article for purely selfish reasons. I wanted to establish a good relationship with the coroner so I would be the first reporter he thought of when getting information out to the media. I think he knew what I was up to. The first thing he did was take me down to the morgue and show me all of the autopsy tools. He also shook a little jar of fingers (yes, fingers) in my face. Those fingers are used when they need to get fingerprints off a body that is too bloated to cooperate. Remove the skin from the deceased, wrap it around the stand-in finger, and voila! I also got to see the morgue's residents, waiting in their body bags in the giant refrigerator. I drew the line at lying down on the metal table, but I passed his test anyway. The story got a lot of positive attention, and I got myself a new buddy in the coroner. Win/win!

2) Dan Savage's adoption story

A lot of people know Dan Savage from the independent Seattle newspaper The Stranger and his sex-advice column "Savage Love." What a lot of people don't know is that Dan and his husband Terry are the loving parents of an adorable little boy named DJ. They adopted DJ from a homeless street kid in an open adoption, and their story is incredibly moving. I covered this story when I was working as an intern for Adoption Today magazine. It was a huge undertaking for a college kid, and Dan was very patient and gracious with me. This story tops my list because it has a genuinely happy ending, and I am a complete sucker for happy endings. I also hope I did a little bit to raise awareness and acceptance of same-sex parenting.

1) Firefighter Jeff Dunn

It's so hard to summarize these stories into little paragraphs, especially this one. Jeff Dunn was a Castle Rock Firefighter/Paramedic who died of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease). My newspaper had covered Jeff's story from shortly after his diagnosis, and he died a few weeks after I started working there. I never got the chance to meet him. A few days after he died, I called his best friend, firefighter Oren Bersagel-Briese, and asked if he would help me put together a tribute to Jeff. Oren gathered all of Jeff's pallbearers and we met at the firehouse. The resulting story was something like 70,000 words, and every one of them ran. I had little to do with how great the story ended up being. All the credit goes to the firefighters who let me into their lives, and into Jeff's life. At the heart of the story was the absolute sense of brotherhood (and sisterhood) among the firefighters. The entire department banded together to take care of Jeff and his family, to raise money for treatment, to cover Jeff's shifts so he didn't lose his health coverage, to keep Jeff as independent as possible for as long as possible. I am truly lucky they let me bear witness to it.

So there they are.

Jennifer Weiner has said that being a reporter is a much better choice than getting an MFA for aspiring novelists. Reporting forces you to observe life, to step outside of your comfort zone. It provides a huge wealth of life experiences that you can't typically get by just living your own life.

It also teaches you not to get too attached to your writing. I guarantee spending a year or two working as a reporter will knock that fear of the red pen right out of you.