Part 31: The Retriever

During one of my visits to UMBC, I stopped by the office of The Retriever, the weekly student paper.

I had some experience writing for and doing production of free community newspapers in Memphis. A small handful of articles I’d written were published. None of it was particularly noteworthy. At the time I’d been reading National Lampoon (when it was good) and thought I could do satire.

While in nursing school, I wrote an article about chest pain and sold it to Emergency magazine for $75. The article was an overview of the differential diagnosis of chest pain – a guide to all the things that can cause chest pain besides heart attack, and how to tell them apart. It wasn’t much different than a paper I might write for school. Except I was paid $75 for it.

I liked the idea of getting paid for writing, but had no idea what to do next. I’d looked at Writer’s Market, the freelancer’s bible, and knew there was a process for pitching and writing freelance stories. It seemed like a closed loop; in order to freelance you had to have some experience, but in order to get experience you had to freelance.

It was a far-fetched dream, too overwhelming to contemplate. How does one break in? What would I write about? Why should an editor at a magazine or newspaper take me seriously?

The Retriever office was comfortably cluttered. I met with Barry Meisel, the paper’s managing editor, and showed him a few things that I’d written.

Sure, you can write for the paper, Meisel said. We pay $15 an article.

Meisel showed me around the Retriever offices; the morgue, the photography department, the production department.

He led me over to an office where two guys were talking. Leaning back in the visitor’s chair was a pudgy senior with an unruly mop of dark hair and a thick moustache. Behind the desk was another student with longish hair and a beard.

“This is John Markus, our editor in chief,” Meisel said by way of introduction. “And this is the Student Government Association president, Terry Nolan.”