Beneath the Byline: Interview with Nancy Walecki
Nancy Walecki is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where she writes about culture, health, and faith. Her feature writing has been awarded the Zenger Prize and a National Headliner Award
Your background: Was there a specific moment that made you realize you wanted to be a journalist? If not, how did you end up where you are? Why journalism and not some other type of writing?
When I was in college, I loved to write, mostly really in fiction and in sort of personal essays and things like that. I always knew that I loved to write, and in an ideal world would be a writer, but I didn't know what that would really look like. I assumed I would have to be a banker and just write on the side or something. But, I took this class in college with this really amazing professor and writer named Anne Fadiman, and she — the assignment in the class — she split the class between people who had a background more just straight up in writing and people that had a background more just in journalism and I was in the writing side. The class was a magazine-journalism-thing that hinged on profiles, so we had an assignment to find somebody in the Yellow Pages and profile them. I picked this— at the time— 89-year-old organic farmer named Guy Beardsley and spent the fall, basically, or spent a couple of months profiling him and learning about farming, and learning about his life, getting to know his family, and it was just so much fun. I could not believe that there might be a job where riding along on the ATV with Guy Beardsley and hearing his stories about the Korean War would somehow pay me. And not only do I get paid for that, but I get to go home and then try to write it up in a way that's satisfying. I was just like, “This totally is up my alley and I would love it. If there's any way for this to be a real job for me, I would love for it to be my job.”
What are your favorite types of stories to tell?
I love something with a really interesting person at the center who just fascinates me. I love stories where the place almost becomes its own character. That's part of why I love to write stories that have to do with my home state of California because I just, I love trying to make it legible to people and explain it, or show it to them because I think there's so many interesting facets of it. So I guess stories that really hinge on, this is so broad, but stories that hinge on places and people. And things that lend themselves to narrative styles of writing. I've learned pretty early on that I more so gravitate toward journalism that's more narrative and more like writing non-fiction that could be fiction in that it really does have an arc and has a beginning, middle, and end. So, stories that lend itself to that. I love getting to reconstruct the chronology of an event and let people into a world that they might not know about. Really any stories that easily lend themselves to the five senses and to portraying actual people.
What story/stories are you the most proud of?
It was my first print piece for the Atlantic and it was a profile of my father and his music store in Los Angeles, which was sort of the hub of the LA music scene in the late 60s into the 70s and 80s. I'm proud of that because, I mean, I wrote it sort of as a— it's kind of like a love note to my dad and to my family and to upbringing and to the people that I came from. But it was also a way to let people into this world that I think is really special in this time period in LA that I was really special. I think I was really proud of weaving it all together because I was kind of having to approach the piece both as a journalist — interviewing tons of people, going through lots of photos and documents and trying to recreate the past with primary sources— but I was also having to think about it as his daughter and kind of toggle between those two things and that was really difficult and also satisfying. It was fun to kind of think through the structure of the piece and see it pay off.
What is your favorite story that you wanted to tell that didn’t get the greenlight or got killed?
I worked on a story that, for a variety of very good reasons, never ended up coming out, but I did a bunch of interviews with young people who had decided to practice sexual abstinence, not for religious reasons, but more so for wellness ones. They felt as though hookup culture was just kind of starting to harm them physically and mentally, or they just weren't satisfied with the people they were dating and wanted to kind of recalibrate. I just liked that story because I was proud of the reporting process, getting to know my sources and talking to people about something really intimate. I liked that I saw that story and went for it and talked to people.
What have been some of the most challenging moments of your career?
The challenging part about a career in journalism, I think— I mean, really, it's probably the same in any career, but I can only speak to journalism — if you're always having to ask yourself, “What’s next?” Not just in terms of, “What’s the next story?” — and that's also a big part of it— but also you're having to toggle between thinking of the big picture of, “What do I want my career to look like?” and “What’s the next big project that I really want to sink my teeth into?”
What writers and authors have influenced your work the most?
I mean, a lot of the writers that have influenced my work are the people that I've had as writing teachers and writing professors in college, but as a reader, hmmm. I mean, Joe Didion's the master, so that's kind of an obvious answer, but she's the master of making a place into a character. I love the novelist Karen Russell. I just think the way she paints characters is so great, and I just love how she can have just this really wildly descriptive, off the wall sentence. I love how she narrates from the perspective of young people usually, in a way that feels really authentic, while still being really interesting to read. I love Wallace Stegner, the novelist. The way he writes about the West is amazing and the way that he writes about a feeling that I definitely relate to and I think in some ways has factored into my own writing and writing about California, is just sort of this feeling of having grown up in the West and then you move East, and you kind of become too eastern for the West, and too western for the East.
How have you seen journalism/the media change throughout your career? What further changes do you anticipate?
I'm still so early in my career that it's hard to say, but one thing I have noticed more is just the degree to which their journalism is beginning to happen in short form video and sometimes really good journalism. But just, that general shift toward having reporters and stuff talk about their work in video form and like in social media video has been interesting to watch.
People consume more media than they ever have. How do you think this has changed the world?
I remember when I was reporting this piece about my dad, I talked to this singer he was friends with, and I asked her, “What was the zeitgeist like in the seventies and when you were in your twenties?” and she said, “We had a very wide but shallow knowledge of the world,” or something like that. I think to some extent, for better and for worse, consuming a lot more media has given everybody the sense that they have a wide understanding of the word, and at the same time, they often do have a shallow one. I don't say that judgmentally. It’s just, I sometimes feel like I know too many things, but at about an inch of depth.
What is your advice for younger people interested in journalism?
Be willing to bet on yourself, and understand that there may be a period of time in which you're believing in your work and you know it has value, but you're not yet receiving financial compensation for that work. When you're first starting out, you should look for jobs that will either— I mean, in the ideal world, right, your first job gets you in the rooms you wanna be in and you're doing the role that you wanna do. So, if you want to be a reporter, if you want to be like a national political reporter, the dream job would be, you're an entry level reporter at the New York Times on the politics desk, right? But that is very rarely what gets to happen. So what you need to do is either think about being in the rooms that you wanna be in long-term, but not in the position yet that you would wanna be in for the decades since. That might be taking an assistant role at a magazine that you love, or a fact checker role at a magazine you love or something like that, with the hope that you will kind of start in that place and grow there. So that's one path. The other thing that you can do is get your chops, get your reps in, in the role that you would eventually like to do, but maybe at a smaller organization that actually isn't maybe your dream place to work, but has really amazing people and great opportunities for you to hit the ground running doing what you would like to do long-term. That might look like being a reporter at a small newsroom or whatever it is.
Part of journalism is paying attention and asking good questions. What are some daily habits or ways of being that promote paying attention and asking good questions?
One thing that's helped me pay attention in my life in general is I've started spending like the first 30 minutes of— well, so when I wake up, I just free-write a few pages of just my stream of consciousness thoughts about the day, and then I sort of meditate and pray for like 30 minutes after that. That sounds woo-woo, but those two things have helped because you kind of dump out whatever thoughts you've carried into the day. And then you meditate, you pray, and then you go into the day kind of better able to pay attention to it and just 10% more present or something like that. Asking good questions: so cliche, but really just listening. Yeah, just listening. Cause you'll find sometimes when people say stuff, they like to leave you little hints about what they might want to be asked next.
What do you read (journalism and not)?
I love fiction. I read so much fiction. You would think working in journalism that I would read non-fiction and I probably should read more of it, but I'm always reading fiction. Right now I'm reading Angle Over Pose by Wallace Stegner and I just love it. It's like reading a devotional before bed or something; I just read a few pages of it and contemplate it and go to bed. It rocks. Yeah, so I love that. And then I'lI kind of alternate: I'll read a couple like classics that I've always wanted to read or whatever, a really good novel, somebody's recommended to me, and then I read a totally just fun, silly rom-com or thriller or something, and then kind of go back into the rotation of reading something a little higher brow. Although I think that romcoms, they're a lot harder than people, they're a lot harder to do probably than people think.
