Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
Chapter 18: Good Times in Asheville and Austin
From 1992 through 2010, World is not my only job. It’s always World plus the University of Texas, or compassionate conservatism, or King’s. I don’t want to be dependent on one source of income, as I was with the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade or DuPont, if that presses me to violate my conscience. Starting in 2011, though, I’m satisfied with being all-in with World. By then I have two decades of experience with the organization. The business leaders and the board have not caved when pressured by advertisers, donors, upset readers, or powers like Dobson and Reed. I feel safe going all-in because the organization has proved itself through adversity. Bonds formed in crisis seem strong.
Even the interviews I’ll do every quarter at Patrick Henry College are part of being all-in, since they will go into the magazine. In 2011, I ask World’s CEO to reduce my salary so we can better hire and help young reporters. Between this and other contributions, I am becoming a significant donor to the
magazine, but it’s an easy decision. World feels like family. In a family, we share whatever we have.
Board members also share. Susan and I move to Asheville, North Carolina, where World’s business office is. During our first half-year in Asheville, we live in a lovely house on the side of a mountain. Its owner, a World board member who tells me he resigned from a corporate job for ethical reasons and gave up $4,000,000 in the process, is teaching temporarily at a seminary in Uganda. Susan and I enjoy wild turkeys crossing the road and black bears rubbing up against the trees in the backyard. We think about ways to teach our best reporting prospects to write tightly, weed out pesky passives, and do semi-colonoscopies.
Susan and I identify two young, high-potential World reporters who need that kind of training. We invite them and a reporter aspirant to spend a summer with us. We meet at 9 a.m. Monday through Friday and assign stories. They do interviews and write for several hours. Then we meet to edit, either one-on-one or in a group. Sometimes we eat together family style. The only rule is to work about eight hours a day.
It’s the beginning of a method we use for the next ten years with dozens of World interns. They want to impress us. None of them acts in a way that causes us to make the internship more rigid. We treat interns as adults. They live up to that. I suspect some HR departments would fret about this unorthodox setup —but it works.
When we house hunt in Asheville, we look for one conducive to having interns live with us for two to seven months at a time. We buy a house with two guest bedrooms. Built in 1927, it’s a mile away from the World business office in Biltmore Village, a neighborhood of historic homes.
Sometimes embarrassments happen. One young man finds mouse turds in the mattress of his sleeper sofa. We learn who can ignore distractions, who can persevere through lots of frustrating phone calls, and who is pleasant to be around. Sometimes casual conversations turn into story ideas. Not all the students want to work at World, or even in journalism—and the internship shows them that. But half become full-time World writers and editors.
Each summer is memorable in different ways. For example, in our second year we have two interns. One is from Korea via Singapore and the journalism school at the University of Southern California. The other comes from a small public school in upstate New York via a tiny Christian college. She travels to Asheville by bus with a suitcase full of art supplies.
They are different in many ways but are both Christians who love to write. They are also both visual artists. Over the course of the summer their writing improves as they submit to our rigorous editing—but the learning isn’t only one-way. They broaden our perspectives and remind us that age, experience, ethnicity, and geography are all filters by which we view the world. They teach us to become better listeners.
In 2011, again inspired by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, I expand the World Journalism Institute by creating a weeklong “mid-career course” for undervalued assets such as moms with journalism degrees who took time out of the workforce. We welcome doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who desire to write, using their specialized knowledge of a subject. Demand is heavy. We choose ten mid-career students each year.
Tuition is free, but attendees pay their own expenses.
For some, the mid-career course is like a Fantasy Baseball Camp, where grown-ups can hang out with real baseball players. World readers who love the magazine are able to see what it’s like to be a journalist. Others are determined to write occasional articles for World, and each year, on average, half do.
World seems a family of sorts, but I also have real family responsibilities. By 2014 we have one grandchild in Texas and more seem likely. Austin is also home base for our children, so in 2014 Susan and I reclaim our Austin house from our tenants and begin traveling back and forth between Austin and Asheville.
Our Austin house is even better for interns and mid-careers, so we move those WJI facets there. The house has three stories and perches on the side of a hill called, with Texas brag, Edwards Mountain. On a clear day, as most are, we can see twenty miles to the west. Our bedroom is on the top floor, living areas are in the middle, and three bedrooms with capacity for six people are on the bottom. Since Austin hotels are expensive, some mid-career students live with us. Close quarters, a packed schedule, and intense in-class editing quickly make friends out of strangers.
Prior to the course, the mid-careers—we call them Worldlings—write obituaries of people who are at least seventy. World keeps a file of edited obituaries to use online at the time God decides. The course typically begins with the ten students, Susan, and we sitting in a circle, computers open to
Google docs. We pull up the first obituary, and everyone reads silently. Is it interesting? Does it have good anecdotes? Does it read like a résumé? Is the ending a kicker (a memorable close) or a bow (a too-sweet wrap-up)?
We also assign the students a big story for the week that gets them out of the house and into on-the-ground reporting. They usually head out full of trepidation and come back joyful: I can do this. They then write scenes based on their reporting. We spend a day weaving those scenes together and developing paragraphs that explain meaning or history. We cut out words, strike passives and Christian jargon, and rewrite for clarity.
Each year brings a different challenge. One year, equipped with recorders and phones, they visit animal shelters, dog friendly restaurants, and gourmet pet stores for a story about Austin as America’s most pet-friendly city. Another year, a story about people with special needs takes them to a school for the deaf and an outreach to the homeless. Each year by the end of the process we have a World feature story—and they have the pleasure of a byline.
This 2011–2021 decade is tremendously rewarding both in teaching and staff-building. By 2021, almost everyone on World’s editorial staff has gone through our training. We also have one marriage proposal in our den (accepted). Another intern later has her wedding in our living room. Two World writers coauthor books with me.
World during that decade becomes more diverse in age, ethnicity, and background but more unified in journalistic approach. We share a verbal shorthand when discussing stories and how to approach them. Many of us develop strong bonds. As a graybeard, I feel fatherly toward the college-aged interns. It’s a great pleasure to think of the organization as a professional family, to say “attaboy” (or the gender equivalent) to our young reporters, and to help keep the light in their eyes ablaze, as Alanis Morrissette sings.
Do I sound a bit wistful? More than a bit. These good developments after the King’s College disappointment affirm Jeremiah Burroughs’s contention in The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment that “nothing befalls you but there is a hand of God in it. . . .When a certain passage of providence befalls me,
that is one wheel, and it may be that if this wheel were stopped, a thousand other things might come to be stopped by this.”
Burroughs says we should learn patience: “When God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do . . . that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day.”
The decade that begins with my leaving King’s in January 2011 is a wonderful one for Susan and me. Burroughs’s advice to “make a good interpretation of God’s ways toward you” is wise. I’m a slow learner: it takes me a lifetime to learn that when problems grow, in a paraphrase of Burroughs, it’s time to “think that God perhaps has given you a trial to build your character. Perhaps you had your heart inordinately set on a particular
selfish goal. Perhaps had you succeeded you would have used the opportunity to fall into sin.”
That advice becomes crucial when political rumblings affect World itself.