In 2003, I was a freelance journalist, writing for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine and the legendary local alternative paper, the Chicago Reader. It was that latter paper for which I wrote one of my most ambitious pieces—a psychological portrait of a then up-and-coming Chicago Alderman: Walter Burnett Jr., of the 27th Ward.
Back then, the Reader published cover stories of approximately 6,000 words. They paid decently if they published your piece—decently, like $3,000. But you had to write them on spec. Reporting a 6,000-word piece is a hell of a thing to do on an editor’s promise of, “Sure, I’ll have a look.” I was young and hungry and I believed in my ability to write great things.
Usually, the Reader published what I sent them—usually, after an editing process that seemed designed to make every writer’s prose read like every other writer’s prose; it was like being nibbled death by ants. But this Burnett piece, the editor rejected. On grounds, as I bitterly recall, that the mind and soul of a politician doesn’t matter. Only his or her actions and their consequences ought to be reported.
I don’t remember throwing my laptop across the room. I do remember printing the story out and putting it in a manila envelope and delivering that envelope to Burnett’s ward office, thinking that at least the subject of the story ought to read what I had to say after spending a week with him and talking to every politician in Chicago who ever rubbed elbows with him.
And of course I was still young then—and as a political journalist, even younger. And a native Ohio buckeye, after all. So I had some doubt. Did I really know how to write properly about Chicago politics? Had I written a light feature on a political heavy? Was the editor right, about the inherent naïveté of publicly plumbing a politician’s emotional life?
So I let the piece cool, before reading it again. For 21 years. Until last week, in fact, when my writer pal Paul Engleman forwarded me a Chicago Block Club piece about Burnett, who is now Vice Mayor, and the most senior alderman in Chicago’s City Council.
I decided to see if that old Word file would even open—it did, begrudgingly—and I reread that profile of Burnett, with one question: Looking back over Burnett’s rise over the last two decades, would the insights I uncovered in the research and writing of this piece have been good for people to know? Or was the editor right in rejecting this silly exercise in seeking the spiritual center of a political animal?
I’m going to run that piece in its 6,000-word, un-nibbled entirety here tomorrow. To the extent Writing Boots readers have the time and interest in a piece that long about a Chicago politician, I think you’ll agree with me that this Chicago Reader editor was full of shit. And further, that we don’t need fewer, but more such dives into our politicians’ lives.
I can’t wait to read it!