by Jack McCune ~
Vicki Glembocki, an award-winning journalist and essayist who earned her BA and MFA from Penn State, visited campus on Thursday, October 10, and spoke to the Klio staff to share her story and give us advice for our own writing and for the design and content of our site. She’s written dozens of feature stories, including many focusing on Penn State alumni, and she also wrote her own book The Second Nine Months. I was especially intrigued by the way she focuses on fun feature stories that highlight a person, a story or an event, like her “You Be the Judge” column, her articles about parenting, and her personal essays.
The following are highlights of her conversation with the class:
When did you know you wanted to be a writer? What got you into writing?
In terms of becoming a writer, I never wrote, I hated writing, but I liked English so I ended up defaulting and I chose the English program here. I wanted to be a doctor. I kept coming up with all the things I wasn’t going to do, and then I ended up in English 215 (an introduction class to article writing) with a teacher who was this crazy fireball. She was just this force. …[It was in this class where] I was finally accepted. I was trying to write stories. I wasn’t trying to write newspaper stories, like who, what, when, where, why and how. I was trying to set a scene. And so when I walked into that class, I knew this is what I’ve been trying to do. This is what I want to do. I want to tell stories that are true that are written like fiction, which is a genre I didn’t even know existed.
What was that one article or assignment you did that really got you going, or really got you your break?
I was in the honors program here starting with my junior year. I wrote this thesis, and there was a guy in town who was a body piercer. Nobody was pierced, nobody, in 1992, it wasn’t a thing. And it really wasn’t a thing anywhere, and here we are in Happy Valley and there’s a piercing parlor? So I followed this guy around and wrote about it for English 415 and then I turned it into my thesis. It was just an article, but it was so much work. And my professor at the time…she had an editor at Playboy and she told me I should send it to Playboy, and I was unsure. And then my thesis advisor (Toby Thompson, who still teaches at Penn State) asked if I had sent my story to Playboy yet, and I said no. Then he gave me a FedEx envelope. So I sent it, and they printed it! Full out, exactly. They changed, like, two words. They paid me $2,500. That was a lot of money. It’s still a lot of money.
The cover for one of Glembocki’s many alum feature stories published in Penn Stater Magazine. This one features Gillian Albinski, a prop master known for her work on the TV show “The Walking Dead.”
Was there ever a time you had to turn down an article opportunity?
I was writing a piece about people having affairs in Philly, and you could go onto this website and married people could go on there to have affairs. And my editor told me to make a profile, and I’m always a “doer”, so I signed up. I ended up having to go meet this guy undercover, and on my way there, I was like, “Nope, I am not doing this.” I just felt like that was too close, that is walking on the wild side. My husband knew, but you just felt this moment of “Nope, I’m not touching this.” I wanted to write about good stuff.
How do you know if your writing, or writing in general, is good writing?
You know stuff right away that works and that doesn’t work. If you’re bored when you’re reading it, it’s probably not good writing. If you’re bored when you’re writing it, it’s probably not good writing.