We are wonderink

I just started Off Ramp, a book by Hank Stuever, this journalist-turned-author who has a really good take on what he calls the American Elsewhere. Where strip malls slowly die and fenced-in concrete fields dot the town or suburb. In the preface, he's describing how his interest in this world (a world in which he grew up) played in to his role as a journalist. He has a different take on journalism. Below is a rough excerpt from a story in the book where he's describing an encounter at a campground with some European college students.

"We are from the Netherlands, and we are for two days wonderink who it is you are, and why you are all the time with cameras and writing down things?"

I have not since heard a more lovely or correct string of words that could so perfectly capture what I believed I was trying to do in newsprint, writing stories that contained almost no important news, no investigative scoops, no Pulitzer-worthy moments of triumph or inspiration, and would be on the recycling stack with the trash in a matter of hours.

Who it is you are.

All the time with cameras and writing down things.

We are wonderink.

As exactly and accurate as I tried to get the facts and quotes about the proposed fiscal budget numbers, to get correct titles of spokespersons, to have the right spelling of names and exact ages of the dead little girls — sisters — pulled from the crumpled automobile on Christmas Eve, I was always going over one distinct boundary in newspapers, and it had to do with the first part of the question: Who it is you are. I was the narrator.

I am all the time with writing down things, looking for a glimmer of who it is you are.

As a journalist, I really relate to this sentiment. I think it's why I could never do a traditional reporting gig. Newspapers just don't really support journalists who really push the writings limits. We work in such a constrictive world of rules. My job is almost entirely composed of learning rules and then enforcing them — on other adults who are intelligent, capable beings, who, outside this job, couldn't care less if I told them their way was wrong and my way — the way of the system — was right. Can you imagine it? "I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Romney. I understand; Though Mitt is merely an annoying usage of a perfectly good piece of sports equipment, Tagg is unacceptable in that spelling; the dictionary only lists Tag with one 'g'. You'll have to pick another name." (Yes, Mitt Romney has a son named Tagg.) Sometimes it's very strange to have to be this voice of authority on rules of grammar, style and usage, when outside work, I encourage and try to live a life free from such restrictions on storytelling and other art forms. Hurray for e.e. cummings. You go, Bjork and Joanna Newsom. Hallelujah for Andy Warhol.

But in four hours, when I turn on my computer at work, sentence fragments will be wrong. Again.

So, reading Mr. Stuever's works is inspiring to me. Working inside the box and outside the box at the same time. And still getting the little girls' names spelled right.

Did his words strike any other writers/journalists out there? What about people who consume media who aren't journalists? I think The New Yorker might be close in achieving this goal (specifically in the Talk of the Town section). And perhaps This American Life. Are there any others?