Community & Emus Loose in Egnar

Truth be told, my move back to Mississippi was a half-cocked, hair-brained (and every other cliche) attempt to give my dream of being a photojournalist (which had been the stepchild of my artist dream for years) room to breathe. I might even call it a drastic, or desperate move. I just needed to do it.

To make it work in San Francisco was too much for me, too soon. From several false starts in the city I learned that I needed to be more detached, less sensitive to others, and considerably more cut-throat. And that doesn't embody the community spirit that I wanted to have in my work, or for myself in general. So I moved back to a place I knew, to start fresh, and to cut my losses. Hopefully, along the way I would also figure out what makes the small-town lifestyle tick.

I'm still working on that last part. At my core, I'm still a city-slicker.

This week I wanted to list my favorite journalism books from 2014. The ones that have accompanied me through this past year of freelancing. But I started with "Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns" and it stuck with me more than the others. 

Egnar got to me because I could see how it related to my small, Mississippi town, and it motivated me to get to know it a little better. Through the featured stories about community newspapers, I find the same idealism I find in many of our dedicated Mississippi residents. It may at times seem overtly optimistic, or worse, romantic like a Chicken Soup for the Journalist's Soul, but these are real stories. There are real frustrations expressed by these community editors, and real challenges, and real successes.

Out of the books I've read, this is a must, for sure. Below is the description of the book from Amazon. "Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns", by Judy Muller is available on Amazon in hardcover, or for the Kindle.

At a time when mainstream news media are hemorrhaging and doomsayers are predicting the death of journalism, take heart: the First Amendment is alive and well in small towns across America. In Emus Loose in Egnar, award-winning journalist Judy Muller takes the reader on a grassroots tour of rural American newspapers, from an Indian reservation in Montana to the Alaska tundra to Martha’s Vineyard, and discovers that many weeklies are not just surviving, but thriving.

In these small towns, stories can range from club news to Klan news, from broken treaties to broken hearts, from banned books to escaped emus; they document the births, deaths, crimes, sports, and local shenanigans that might seem to matter only to those who live there. And yet, as this book shows us, these “little” stories create a mosaic of American life that tells us a great deal about who we are—what moves us, angers us, amuses us.

Filled with characters both quirky and courageous, the book is a heartening reminder that there is a different kind of “bottom line” in the hearts of journalists who keep churning out good stories, week after week, for the corniest of reasons: that our freedoms depend on it. Not that they would put it that way, necessarily. In the words of one editor in Colorado, “If we found a political official misusing taxpayer funds, we wouldn’t hesitate to nail him to a stump.”