[caption id="attachment_397" align="alignleft" width="202" caption="Jeremy Miller in jaunty hat, new Lighthouse instructor"]
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It's not where did you buy your hat, or what are you listening to on your iPod, but how'd a guy like you get a cover article in the pages of Harper's? So I asked him, and this is what he said. (Part II will be up later this week.)
I will not bore the reader with a clumsy, pseudo-psychological exploration of "the kind of guy I am," which seems implied in the first part of the question.
I'll keep it to a tracing of key events, the ones I see as leading – albeit twistily – to the publication of my article "Tyranny of the Test," in last September's Harper's.
At the risk of cliché, I'll begin by saying I worked very hard. I was also very lucky.
By "luck" I do not mean an entirely passive, random process - though there was some of that. I attribute a good portion of it to an internship I did at the magazine a few years back. I attribute some of it also to a variant of David Mamet's "Always Be Closing," which I have modified slightly for my own, writerly purposes: "Always Be Pitching."
An internship was required for the Boston University science and medical journalism master's program I was enrolled in back in 2004-2005. My resume at the time was anemic, punctuated with credits from community weeklies like the Queens Chronicle, Greenpoint Star, and a now-defunct Denver entertainment magazine. On a whim, I sent an application to Harper's, along with applications to a diverse array of environmental magazines and scientific journals, from Audubon and Mother Jones, to JAMA and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. These were unsuccessful ventures.
Henpecked by the dwindling prospects, and with a little less than a month to secure an internship, I got a call from Ben Austen, the internship director at Harper's. In my state of panic, I'd forgotten that I'd even sent in an application. I gelatinized when he said I was being considered for a position. That the job was unpaid mattered little in my quivering state. He said they wanted to interview me the next day.
The interview didn't go well. I stammered and meandered but managed to give an explanation of my work as a reporter and a clunky description of my vain aspirations to become a writer or essayist in the vein of Lewis Thomas or Loren Eiseley. I also mentioned that I had worked for four years as a tutor and high school teacher in New York City. It turned out that Ben had taught a few years at a high school in Thornton, Colorado.
Hey, I grew up in Colorado, I said.
Had I heard of Skyview? he replied.
Yes, indeed. Attended Arvada High School myself.
(You see how these things work.)
Another fortuitous line of conversation in the interview was purely logistical. My wife was pregnant and due at the beginning of September. This corresponded to the end date of the internship. I told him, were I to get the job, I'd need to travel back and forth between Boston and NYC on weekends – to do the dishes, clean the floors and and rub my wife's feet in atonement for all the money I wouldn't be making. There would be lamaze classes, I said, and painting the baby's room and check-ups, too. I breathed deeply; if the baby were born early, I'd have to abandon the job.
His first child had been born a few months earlier. "There's nothing like it," he said. Then he thanked me, ominously. I immediately sent a thank you email. For good measure (and slightly out of panic), I attached a few pitches and non-fiction pieces I'd been working on at B.U. The email address I sent them to, it turned out, did not to belong to Ben Austen but Ben Metcalf, the literary editor. I got a call back a day or two later from Ben Austen. "Congratulations,” he said with a hint of excitement. “You got the job. I have to be honest, we took you out of the running after the interview. It seemed like you may have had too much on your plate. But then Ben Metcalf came running in with your stories and he said 'hire this guy.' So I had no choice."
(You see how these things work.)
Check out Jeremy Miller's cover article, "Tyranny of the Test," and also check out his One-Day Immersive Journalism workshop on April 24 (rescheduled from April 11 due to a conflict).
