At 'The Village Voice,' there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'
You can criticize any news staff in some ways, but the one thing that you couldn't call the Village Voice staff was a staff of stenographers, taking notes from public figures and just passing them on.
Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.
It's not uncommon to have chaotic writers' rooms.
The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.
I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.
I had a galvanised voice: I could sing through a 105 fever or a flu or a root canal or anything that you could throw at me.
When I was in college, my whole goal was to write for the 'Village Voice,' and I think I was doing that by the time I was twenty-one or twenty, so everything else has kind of been gravy, you know?
Because I was once a reporter, I've always felt a sense of estrangement inside the newsroom. The field is alive and interactive, while the newsroom is quiet and stereotypical.
You arrive at a village, and in this calm environment, one starts to hear echo.