Pat Bean's blog

I always felt more at home in a newsroom than at home. This was my little working corner at the Standard-Examiner for the 10 years I was the paper’s environmental reporter. While I loved everything about my 37-year journalism career, this was my favorite assignment. — Photo by my journalism colleague Charlie Trentelman.

“It is necessary to write if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten …That is where the writer scores over his fellows: He catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” Vita Sackville-West.

I started writing my memoir just about a year ago. I wrote two chapters that pleased me. Then I read the beginning of a memoir by another author and suddenly was not so happy about my own. I realized what I had written ignored common writing advice to begin with the action. My first words lacked the hook to make the reader continue reading.

Since that illumination, I have written zero on the memoir, questioning even if I want to do all the hard work such a project requires – from dredging up memories I’d rather remain forgotten, to rewriting and rewriting to make the words sing like they should, to the agonizing nitty-gritty editing required that I know and understand perfectly from publishing Travels with Maggie, to the relentless task of finding a publisher or self-publishing and marketing, etc., etc., etc.

I think I have an important story to tell about journalism in its heyday, and how a high school dropout and mother of five became an award-winning journalist who interviewed U.S. Presidents Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon, military generals, governors, homeless fathers, astronauts, Irving Stone, Robert Redford, and Maya Angelou, just to name a few highlights of an exciting career that began with me sneaking in the backdoor of a small Texas newspaper as a darkroom flunky.

If I write my story, I would call it Between Wars, as my first significant byline story in 1967 involved interviewing a mother whose son had been killed in Vietnam and one of my last articles was an opinion column in 2003 that argued against going into Iraq the second time.

To write, or not to write? That’s this writer’s dilemma. How do I want to spend the next three to five years of my life if I’m blessed to still be around that long?

I retired in 2004 and spent the next nine years traveling this country in a small RV with mt canine companion, then wrote about some of the adventures in Travels with Maggie, now available on Amazon. .

Bean Pat: Dorothy Gilman and her Mrs. Pollifax fictional protagonist. I’m currently rereading the books, and am now on Book 8 of the 14-book series, and loving the hat-loving senior citizen’s upbeat outlook on life. I recommend the books as relief from all the nastiness that is going on in the world today.

Pat Bean is a retired journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion, Scamp. She is a wondering-wanderer, avid reader, enthusiastic birder, Lonely Planet Community Pathfinder, Story Circle Network board member, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon, and is always searching for life’s silver lining.