Four years after graduating UMass with my degree in English and two years into a journalism career, I have found that part of my half-baked fantasy of a writer's life is true. It isn't guaranteed to pay well. Currently I am a full-time reporter for a small weekly newspaper chronicling the life and times of Stow, Massachusetts. Stow is a fairly wealthy, rural community of about 5,500, about twenty-five miles west of Boston and a million miles from anywhere I envisioned myself four years after leaving college. Contrary to what I feared when I took the job a year and a half ago, Stow does have news to report.
People are born, people die.
The school committee needs more money and the taxpayers aren't sure they can afford it. Stow has even had a small gang-related incident on my watch. It sometimes seems like Stow exists in a vacuum, but people here face the same daily grind people face everywhere else. During slow news weeks, loose cows may be the highlight of the police incident log. The one bar in town makes The Hatch look like Studio 54 and also functions as a deli and grocery store.