I promised you in my last post that I’d explain how my passion for journalism started, so here goes:
I’ve always wanted to tell stories. As a child, most of my friends played hide-and-go-seek. I read Harriet the Spy. Inspired by Harriet, I would walk around the neighborhood with my Lisa Frank notebook and ask my neighbors if they had any news to share. As an 11-year-old, this was my idea of spying. Intrigued by my inquisitiveness (and the binoculars I wore around my neck) my 74-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Irish, would update me on her children’s lives. Mr. and Mrs. Graham always filled me in on how many cars had sped down the street. Mr. Moore updated me on Esmerelda, the stray cat that often brought mice to his doorstep. Though not exactly breaking news, their stories gave me the opportunity to do what I loved: write and report. My neighborhood was my beat, the place where I searched for people and ideas, the place where I realized how many stories are left untold.
Now, 15 years later, I’m still a little write-a-holic, but my beat is St. Pete. Actually, my beat while writing for Poynter Online is more so the journalism industry. Sounds like a big “beat,” but basically I’m writing/editing articles meant to serve as resources for journalists. I prefer to say that I now “investigate” stories and “people watch” rather than “spy” like Harriet, but really, it all comes down to being curious and desiring to reveal what’s true.
How did you get started in journalism or whatever profession you’re in? C’mon, I know you must have some stories to share. Enlighten us.
Word on the Street 
Mallary, I can just picture you walking around at age 11 with a notebook. Actually, I can’t picture you without a notebook in hand, ready to write. I hope you’re finding some great stories in “St. Pete.”
I remember what inspired me to get involved with journalism: My second grade creative writing class, where I wrote an absolutely stunning piece of work called “The Great Bank Robbery.” Now, mind you, this was fictional, but it made me wonder what kinds of real-life bank robberies were going on that I didn’t know about. For years, I proclaimed I wanted to be a writer, and until junior year of high school I was apprehensive about writing as a career because I felt I had nothing to write about. A high school teacher tole me I was “awful at expressing myself in writing” during my junior year. She apparently was unimpressed with my Spanish short story about a butterfly with human characteristics, which I now recognize was a bit out there. But she had no right to tell me I had no hope of ever being published. She apologized for being blunt but said someone needed to tell me this. I got mad, but it was just the push I needed. I applied for an internship at the Milford Daily News, secured it, and was published within a month. I had finally found my stories, my subject matter: In the people around me and in the community I called home. I often wonder if she reads my weekly newspaper columns now, which are published in 12 newspapers across Massachusetts and Connecticut.
I’ve had many discouraging moments in my short career as a writer, but the important thing to remember, I think, is to let those moments serve as a catalyst for change–not in who I am as a person or a writer, but to move onward and upward to places where I can learn more about the craft and expressing myself through writing.