This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 10, 2011 -Dana Goodyear has been a writer since before she arrived in St. Louis as a 12 year old. She still has the water-logged, speckled composition notebooks of her youth where she attempted to make sense of and organize the world around her. In the years since she moved away from St. Louis, she has honed and expanded her craft as a reporter and editor at The New Yorker and as a poet. Her second collection of poetry will be published early next year.
Her latest endeavor eschews the written page entirely. With Jacob Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker, Goodyear co-founded Figment.com, a website for young writers to connect with other writers, publish their work and receive feedback.
Goodyear had the idea for a website after she wrote a 2008 article inThe New Yorker about Japanese cell phone novels. With their length measured often in screens instead of words or pages, "The cell-phone novel, orkeitai shosetsu, is the first literary genre to emerge from the cellular age," wrote Goodyear. Young Japanese women write them for other young women about love, relationships and obstacles to happiness. Goodyear spent six weeks in Japan researching the article.
"The whole idea not only sprang out of her research, but I think she had a real sense of what was necessary for building a teen site and building a place that allowed for this creative expression that didn't exist before," Lewis said.
Goodyear and Lewis didn't want to mimic Maho i-Land (Magic Island), Japan's most popular cell-phone novel website that hosts more than a million of the novels. Figment.com was originally tested as a Facebook-like social networking site for literary-minded teens, but Lewis and Goodyear found they could not compete. Instead, figment.com allows its users "to discover new content, to follow along with stories, and follow along with authors, and we allow you to write."
So far the website is successful and growing. "The numbers vastly exceed our wildest expectations. It's not just a place to dump your content. It really is a place to interact with somebody. People put stuff up there, and they expect a response," Lewis said.
Lewis had nothing but good things to say about Goodyear as a co-founder, journalist and editor. "She has a way getting into information and into people that makes her stories seem seamless. She's a really amazing journalist," Lewis said.
The Beacon recently talked with Goodyear from her home in California where she serves as a lecturer for University of Southern California's Master of Professional Writing Program.
How did you discover your love of writing as a child?
Goodyear: I think that I was the kind of child that needed a way to channel my observations so I was writing a diary when I really little. I found that act of writing really organized my thinking. But it wasn't too long before I was attempting to give form to what I was writing. I was writing some poems, but I was aware that I didn't have the experience of life required to write yet. I remember thinking, "I better hurry up and have some experiences so I have something to write about."
If you had had the chance as a young writer, would you have used Figment.com?
Goodyear: Certainly had something like figment existed when I was little, I would have used it. I had such a clear idea that I was a writer, but I don't know if my peers knew that about me. I don't know if there was a way that I could communicate that to my friends. The school literary magazine is usually for much older students; and later in my schooling I did get involved in literary magazines and that sort of thing, but had I access to peers in a form where I could declare myself a writer and have my work evaluated, critiqued, and encouraged, I think that would have been incredibly helpful to me. But what would have happened at 14 if I had been able to post some of what I was writing and have people respond to me or started literary friendships with people who lived in different parts of the country based on a shared love of a certain author? That would have been incredibly stimulating for me.
How has your writing evolved since your youthful journal entries?
Goodyear: The most obvious way that my writing life has changed is that now often when I write there is an awareness that whatever I am writing is likely to be read by other people, strangers. I'm writing for publication most often now. I think that awareness changes my work for better. It has to be clear, it has to be comprehensible, it has to be something that I'm OK having someone read. But it's also important for me sometimes to lose my awareness of publication. It can be a very stifling thing. I sort of have to train myself not to think about the ultimate form in which it is going to be read. Practically, the work I do as a journalist for The New Yorker is very different from the poems I write. But I go out in the world with a reporter's notebook and interview people like the way you're interviewing me now. That's a whole layer that doesn't exist when writing poems.
How did you come to be a writer for The New Yorker?
Goodyear: Honestly, I completely lucked out. ... I got a job working as an assistant at The New Yorker. While I was doing that job, I got a chance to start writing. I basically learned how to do that watching the people around me and asking questions and making mistakes. Eventually I was an editor and I learned much more about the non-fiction writers' process from the writers I was working with. I was very lucky in that I was given the chance to write before I had too much responsibility as an editor. I really had nothing to lose. I think that if I had advanced as an editor without having had my first shot as a writer, it might have been too awkward to try to become a writer, too. But the two tracks happened simultaneously so I didn't have to experience that 10 years into my career as an editor I say "oops, I actually want to write." ...
One of the things I learned from the people around me at The New Yorker is how hanging in there with a subject is really the best way to get your story because you have to stick with it and spend enough time that you understand something about their character and you know when they are doing something characteristic or doing something revealing that is against character. Also, I learned how to structure a story. When editing, you sort of get inside the machinery of a piece of writing; and when you start moving pieces around, you start to understand the logic of why things are where they are. I think that I internalized those rhythms.
Do you find your poetry and your reporting ever intersecting in interesting ways?
Goodyear: Sometimes they do intersect. I just finished a second manuscript and there are some poems in there that arose directly from a reporting experience. I went into a situation as a reporter with notebook, and I never ended up writing about it as non-fiction, but it provided the scenario for a long poem in the collection. I think that being in the habit of walking around with a notebook jotting things down is helpful for me as a poet. Constantly, ideas or images are occurring to me in the world that are crystalized by something I see, and I think that having a life that takes me into unfamiliar territories yields good results for my poems. I think I need that interaction with the world in order to refresh my bank of images.
Alex Sciuto is a freelance writer and former Beacon intern.