On Gonzo Journalism, Memoirs, and Friends

This week marks the fifth birthday of Open Diary. Tell us about your Open Diary experience: how you started, what’s been good, what hasn’t, what you think your future with OD might hold…

I started my diary on January 6, 1999. I was referred to the site by my oldest online friend Deliciae (a.k.a. Alice Supernova). At the time, I had just moved home from Rhode Island and was deep into my career as a journalist. Kath, knowing words were my thing, passed on the information.

I was a big believer in “Gonzo journalism”—a phrase coined by Hunter S. Thompson (he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)—the concept of a journalist stepping outside the realm of objectivity and actually becoming a part of the story.

My first entry was a scant 95 words. “I promise (tenatively) this is will be the last time I write an entry that is not a true-life experience of mine,” was the first sentence I wrote on OD.

Since this was obviously something I couldn’t do at the magazine, I used my diary to test the waters. As I was mulling book ideas, I thought that OD would be the ideal place to test the waters. To see if an audience actually existed.

I’m happy to admit that the experiment was a success. And like it or not, you are all Gonzo journalists. The old journalism adage that “Everyone has a story” is indeed true.

OD started as a place for me to hone my writing. The notes served as feedback as to what worked and what didn’t.  I produced hundreds of pages of missives which served as raw material for the book that I started (and hardly worked on).

It became, however, something entirely different.

(Continued in next entry)