A Blank Canvas

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:25:39 -0500

I’m back in London after a nice break in the sun and surf, and now that I’m back on the right side of the day, I realise that I’m way overdue to start putting some content on this website.

I find it slightly daunting…like sitting in front of a blank canvas with new paints, new paintbrushes and an only slightly clear idea of the overall picture I want to create. Historically, I’ve not been terribly good at posting on my blog, and I intend to change this with my Freelance website. Yesterday I sat down at my journal and wrote (longhand! with a pen!) for about two hours and tried to address a lot of the reasons I’ve been putting road blocks up in front of myself.

One of the things I’ve been guilty of in the past is self-censure. I lived in a very small and conservative town for ten years prior to moving here, and working at the paper meant that I never felt as though I was free to state any strong opinion I may have had in a public forum like a website. While I worked there I seldom wrote opinion pieces, and on the rare occasions I did, I tried to not offend anyone. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is not very opinionated at all. I chalk this up to one of my earliest experiences of working in the press.

When I was seventeen, I was one of a handful of students selected to write a weekly column in the citywide newspaper (not the one I worked at most recently, by the way). Every week we would take turns doing different bits of the section: one week you’d do a hard news story, the next week a feature, a business profile, an opinion piece, and so on. By the time it was my turn to write an opinion piece, I chose to respond to the one that had appeared in our column the previous week – one stating support for the war in Iraq and Kuwait. It was 1991 and we were in the thick of the first Gulf War, something I strongly opposed. The previous week’s contributor had stated that the United States were right in going to war in Iraq because they had invaded Kuwait, a small, defenceless little country that was just minding its own business. My response went something along the lines of “we didn’t go to war with the Soviet Union when they invaded Afghanistan – they didn’t have any oil that we needed.”
While that wasn’t the most well thought-out of arguments, in retrospect, I don’t think it was terribly bad for a 17-year old. The rest of the piece elaborated on how it was possible to support the troops but still oppose the war and probably wasn’t going to win any Pulitzers, but as the daughter and granddaughter of veterans I felt it my responsibility to write something that I felt very strongly about.

Our bylines contained information about which schools we attended, and that week I received some post addressed to me at my high school. One of them was from a WWII veteran reminiscing about what it was like to mend and make do. The other letter was less nice. It had no return address and along with the typical “if you don’t like this country, then leave it” banter (which I did end up doing, 15 years later), was a threat. Not a death threat per se, but definitely a threat about how I should watch my mouth as well as my back. I was terrified – I was seventeen, for goodness sake! I told my principal and my mother about it and for several months I was very careful about where I went and was hypervigilant of my surroundings. We never called the police, although we probably should have done.

At any rate, I’ll say that was probably one of the main reasons I didn’t write many articles for the opinion pages from then on. Including my last newspaper job…although that was also partly because I felt strongly that to maintain the integrity of journalistic neutrality I shouldn’t ever come right out and Say Certain Things. Even though our managing editor and our publisher were staunch Republicans, the paper was constantly being accused of Rampant Liberalism and I saw no need to add fuel to that fire – I just did my best at making my views known by the stories I chose to cover, and hoped that would be enough to convey the kind of hopes I had for our community. Because in my opinion, Left and Right on the political spectrum isn’t as important as doing good things for people who are less fortunate than others.

So now that I’m not attached to any particular publications and am free to write about what I want to write about, I’m struggling to overcome 20 years of diplomatic self-censure…and I’m finding it quite challenging. Hopefully with some small blog posts (and possibly a few long-winded ones) I’ll be more comfortable and not censor myself so much. I’ve never been afraid to upset the apple cart and speak out in situations when I feel that someone else is being taken advantage of or is being treated unfairly – and going forward I intend to treat my writing with that same level of respect.

Valerie Goodman Freelance

A Blank Canvas