Forgotten Articles from a Former Career

Tonight I busied myself dunging out more than 10 years of emails from my Gmail account. (It was, uh...FULL! Ha!)  In the process I came across some of the articles I had written for The Fresno Bee's former IMAGINE magazine. Some of them I remember, but others... I wrote that? My name is slapped on them and I saved them in my emails, so they must be mine. I made them as big as I can (Can you, the reader, make them bigger? Hmm..). There are six altogether. Take a look or don't.

This first article is on former original Mouseketeer, Karen Pendleton. I had met her several years earlier as she was a co-worker of my friend Janet. I was thrilled to get to do the article on her, but I think she would have liked to have foregone the experience and exposure.

Aside from the subject's name, Suzanne Bertz-Rosa, I have NO memory of this article. 

Okay, on this one you are probably thinking that it lists a different author. Why is this included? You are right. It does have a different person's name listed. What happened was a freelancer submitted an article that was, well, not up to The Bee's standards. (It was a mess.)  My boss gave it to me and told me to re-write it. So, lucky me (UGH!) got to go out and get a crash course in ladies fashion and ghost write this thing. It's more mine that the original author's and I've wondered on occasion what the original writer thought when she saw the final version that was so different than what she had submitted. Oh well. I hated doing it---but it turned out better than what I was handed to fix.

I wrote this? Really? I have ZERO memory of this piece. NONE! ZILCH! Nadda! 

Here is another article I completely forgot about. While I do have vague memories of visiting this part of town, the article and everything in it had completely evaporated from my mind.

This last article made me nervous when I wrote it. Why? Because the subject, Pulitzer prize-winning poet Philip Levine, really didn't want to open up and talk about himself. I had to rely on a lot of research and interviews with his colleges to get this to work. He was named Poet Laureate of the United States in 2011, a few years after the article was done. He died in 2015. For the article, he gave us permission to print one of his poems. It follows after the article.

That's it for now. Thanks for visiting.

CHEERS!