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Call For Nominations

Here's your chance

From Roy Peter Clark:

Chip Scanlan and I have been asked to do a third edition of the Bedford book: “America’s Best Newspaper Writing.” The first edition was a historical anthology of the best of the best from the ASNE Writing Awards competition and books.

This go-around, Chip and I would like to expand the pool of potential stories beyond ASNE winners. So we are looking to add about 15 stories from these categories:

deadline writing
local reporting and beats
business and explanatory
obituaries and funerals
crime and courts
opinion and persuasion
the profile and feature story
war and disaster

We are open to nominations from the readers of Gangrey. Please nominate one of your own stories, or one that stands out for you from another writer.

We are looking for newspaper stories only. It would be cool if the story won some award, but even that is not necessary. For example, I’m nominating Kelley Benham’s obituary of Terri Schiavo. You can send your nominations to me at rclark@poynter.org, or hash them over on Gangrey. Thanks. – RPC

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Re: Call For Nominations

Getting to The Point

By Michael Kruse
Times Herald-Record
mkruse@th-record.com

At midnight, when this village starts to blink, when the inky black meets the sooty blue, the Sunoco shuts up and the Mobil turns unique.
It stays light in the dark.
Rich Bryant works inside, works the graveyard shift because he wants to, because people, he says, are more interesting at 2 a.m. than they are at 2 p.m.
He wears a gray winter hat all year round, along with three gold hoops in his left ear and one more in the upper portion of his right, and his glasses have small, silver rims.
And from behind the counter, where he stands with the candy, cigarettes and lottery tickets, he watches others' patterns while developing his own.
He has a theory.
"I call it The Point," Rich says one night a couple of hours into his shift. "The Point where you can no longer do anything about your life."
About what it is.
Where it's going.
What it was supposed to be.
Rich is 19, he works from 12 to 8, and his name is written in red script on a white, egg-shaped patch that's stuck to a greasy oxford shirt he wears when most everybody else is asleep.
And that's what he knows, that's what he's learned from this job, this window, this necessary 15-month buffer between his senior year at Warwick Valley High and his first semester at SUNY New Paltz.
That's what he sees.
The Point.
But that's not all he sees.
He sees the Girls. They come around 3.
They roll up in a bumper-sticker-covered forest-green Suzuki Sidekick and buy goopy soft-serve while wearing hooded sweatshirts and clown-baggy pants and pieces of metal in places they shouldn't.
"How long you had that in your face?" someone asks.
One of the girls looks up from her ice cream.
"This guy's weirding me out," she says to the other two.
Rich smirks real small.
He sees them every night.
Just like he sees all the kids across the way, eating Doritos and time at closed Sunoco, standing in front of the big white sign with the big red letters.
NO LOITERING.
What do you want to do?
What do you want to do?
What do you want to do?
"Over and over," Rich says. "That's all you hear. That's Warwick. Same s--- every day."
The cops want to know why.
Why not a field? Why not a farm? Why not a house? Why not a basement? Why not the drive-in?
Why here?
They talk for two hours, swill brackish coffee and suck pastries out of plastic wraps in a neon lot down the street from a village with five antique shops, no grocery store and a place called Frazzleberries.
And they want to know why.
"Five antique stores," Rich says, "and where can I buy a pair of f---ing socks?"
A kid called Kevin has no idea.
He comes in shortly after 4, with bad teeth, greasy, matted hair and a black Beatles T-shirt, and he starts to tell stories while eating a microwaved burger he says contains "circus animals, but mostly filler."
Kevin's 22, he hates New York City, and he just returned from a visit with his girlfriend in Columbus, Ohio, where he apparently saw traffic light "things" that were yellow, not black.
"It's like finding a blue fire hydrant," he says as the clock meanders toward 5. "It changes your world."
Does not.
Old people still buy Junior Mints. Young people still buy Starburst. Everybody still buys Snickers.
Rich knows this.
He watches Old Warwick show up around this time, with yellow fingernails, Camel-ribbed voices and rusty, grimy pickups.
He watches New Warwick happen a little later, with tie clips, hair gel, shoe polish and shiny city-bound Saabs and SUVs.
"I watch the world wake up," he says, "and they're very hung over, and they're very tired."
They all have their times and their places and their lists.
"How can you NOT fall into a rut?" he says. "No matter what you do, there'll come a point when you're like, 'S---, I do this every day.'
"You become aware of the rut."
And it gets light again.

Re: Call For Nominations

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