By the time you read this, I will be gone.
No longer the staff writer for The Graham Star, I will be back in the classroom, teaching ninth-grade and creative writing at Cherokee High School.
No matter where my career has taken me – from gutting houses after Hurricane Katrina, to working for Job Corps – I always come back to teaching, whether the subject is college English or horseback riding. I knew I would not stay away from the classroom forever, but it turns out I stayed away for just over a year.
In my mere 10 months as a journalist, I learned a great deal. I came to the Star as a writer of fiction and non-fiction, with zero experience as a journalist.
When Gary Corsair hired me, he said, “I’m shoving you into the deep end of the pool.”
Some weeks, I swam.
Some weeks, I floundered.
Some weeks, I did well just to tread water.
But all along, I loved the work. Discovering subjects, hearing people’s stories, doing research, writing the copy and then listening to people’s reactions, I loved every bit of that.
But I did not just learn how to write articles. I learned this county. Thanks to this job, I know this county better than I knew my Mississippi hometown, where I lived for 28 years.
And Graham County got to know me. On a recent trip to the dump, a stranger stopped me and said, “Hey, are you the one whose load of horse feed got stole?”
There is no such thing as anonymity when you work for the local paper of record.
Of course, I also learned about every subject I chose. From leather britches to Large Black pigs to booger masks, I can now bore you to death with the details on subjects I had even never heard of, until I moved to western North Carolina.
And I have attended events I never would have gone to on my own – from a singing bowl performance to moccasin-making classes – and I have listened to more live bluegrass than I expected to hear in my entire lifetime.
Now it is time for me to go back where I came from: not to New Orleans, but to the classroom.
Thank you for reading, Graham County. You will see me around, just no longer in the bylines of The Graham Star.
Robbi Pounds wrote for The Graham Star for 10 months.