One of the benefits of working in a university community is that there are so many opportunities for personal and cultural enrichment -- guest lectures, concerts and plays, and the like. Now in only its third year, Grady's Women's Voices event is fast becoming one of my favorites. Every year the diversity committee puts two women on a stage, allowing them talk about their careers and lives, and their friendship with each other.
This year the speakers were Moni Basu and Teresa Weaver, who for a while both worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Moni as an international correspondent and Teresa as book editor. Their conversation was so interesting that I didn't take notes, I just listened.
I did ask a question: "Can you tell us the single best story you've done in your career?" Moni identified her Iraq war coverage generally, and then pointed specifically to a story with an Athens connection. She worked for weeks as an embedded reporter to get into the good graces of a particular sargeant, who finally talked with her and shared his letters to his daughter, who lives here in Athens. Teresa particularly recalled interviewing Toni Morrison at a cafe in New York -- she'd been scheduled for an hour but Toni stayed for two-and-a-half just because they were so involved in the conversation -- and a story about a writer who ran for governor in West Virginia in order to take on the mining companies for blowing the tops of mountains to get at the coal. At one point, she recalled, they were sneaking around a cemetary in the middle of the night to try to get pictures because the mining company wouldn't let them in.
The great thing about these conversations is that you get to see the real person, not the prepared speech or the droning lecture. Their passion for getting the story, and getting it right, shines.
Comments