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Join , newsletter subscribersβand don't miss that story everyone is talking about. Register with Longreads for free and get access to our editors' picks collecting the best stories on the web, as well as our award-winning original writing. Our privacy policy can be found here. An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link. While striving to become a travel writer in the years after Watergate, Thomas Swick discovered that although writing for a newspaper was educational, there was more to be learned through romance with a foreigner.
Thomas Swick Longreads July 19 minutes 4, words. In the fall of I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France. I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times.
There seemed little reason to play it straight. A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview β my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly.
I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton. The features editor looked like a young Virginia Woolf in tortoiseshell glasses. She told me the paper was owned by the Washington Post and that one of her writers, a young man by the name of Blaine Harden, was exceptionally talented. The gist of the interview was that the editor β who, I later learned, had posted my job application on a wall in the newsroom β could not hire someone with no experience, as everyone else had come to the Times from other newspapers.
