O/B: Week Four

It's been about a month now since I began with Outside Bozeman, and we just keep on keeping on.

This Monday was my first production deadline with the editors-- which means all my articles had to be ready to hit the press: researched and written, fact-checked, and copy-edited. For the most part, I feel like the seven pieces I was in charge of have come out well, though I do feel like they don't do much. I can't wait for a chance to write what needs to be written, but this whole experience is about paying my dues so I can learn how to climb to the top.

That being said, I learned some valuable lessons via the process of writing these pieces. First, I held an interview with the Montana Raptor Conservation Center, a local non-profit, and was surprised how very different it went than I had been anticipating. In my mind and my experiences, interviews always consisted of a relatively formal process where questions are laid out (though certainly flexible, as good interviewers should move where the speaker takes them) and there is a certain level of expectation from both parties on the Q/A format. But when I walked in to the Center and met Jason and Becky-- the only two paid employees at the Center-- I quickly realized I needed to ditch my spiral notebook and just listen. Thank god I had picked up a recorder the evening before because being able to go back and transcribe the conversation was the single most helpful tool for the completion of the piece.

Becky took me from cage to cage and introduced me to each of the recovering birds. It was easy to see the clear respect and awe she had for the wildness of the raptors, and from the way she spoke about them I sensed how rewarding being able to release these birds again must be for her. I met owls of all sizes and vultures, golden and bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and several smaller raptors that I only know by the names Nekka and Watson, the friendly buggers-- Nekka liked to roost on my head as Becky showed me around.

I could talk about the experience there for longer than I care to here, but I found it really interesting that what I had thought I would walk away with in terms of content was so far from what I found most interesting. I was so captivated by the raptors and what these two incredible individuals are doing that I wanted to focus on giving them something in turn for what the birds gave me while I was around them. I wrote the piece much more heavily geared toward advocacy, making clear that the Center is a 501c3 and that they offer some really unique opportunities to the community in terms of their education courses. None of my work has been reviewed yet by the editors, so I don't know if I hit the nail on the head or nailed myself in the head quite yet... but I have faith in the quality of my work-- which counts for something, right?

I find that the office dynamic is rather engaging at Outside Bozeman. There are several other interns, two other editorial who I see and work with frequently. For the most part we are separate in terms of our work, but there are smaller mutual projects that we collaborate on. I find that I seem to be the most serious of the three of us, which has proven beneficial since I also seem to have the most responsibility. It's nice to have partners to ask the stupid questions, or who understand when you just need to sigh and say "fuck" every three minutes because you have so much to do that you can't keep straight in your head what to work on next. There's also an aire of competition between us, which seems to help keep me motivated and gives me a place to compare others' work and my own-- don't think this happens nearly enough in a classroom setting.

Again, I am staying hopeful and positive. There is another copy-edit deadline rolling in on Friday, meaning the rest of this week will be ten hour days working non-stop on the 60 submitted pieces for the spring issue. Vamos!