Pixel Dance

Art is a loose term to me. When I asked Karla Dial, one of the news and magazine writers I know, to be a guest on my blog, she said she wasn’t really an artist. But I think she is. And I think anyone who watches today’s news would agree. It’s an art to come to a story, be able to assess its angles, research the facts, and propose an unbiased recounting of why it is important to the readers. Really, not many people do it well anymore. Karla does it very well. Here’s her story, in her own words:

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I got started in my career as a journalist in the most unlikely of places—the library of my junior high school in 1980-something.

I was in ninth grade, about to graduate and move on to senior high school. In order to sign up for classes, the administrators had us all fill out forms indicating our interests to help us find electives. At the top of the form was a blank to fill out titled “Career Objective.”

I paused at that point and really thought about my “career objective” very hard for the first time. Until then, I’d always wanted to be a jockey, like my hero Alec Ramsey in “The Black Stallion” book series by Walter Farley. I loved horses—but my granddaddy’s cattle ranch didn’t really provide the kind of riding, nor his Quarter Horses the kind of racing, I’d read about all those years. And if Alec had taught me anything, it was that the ideal jockey was only five feet tall, if that, and barely over 100 pounds. I was only 14, but I could tell I was going to be just a little too big for the job.

So I thought about what I was good at instead. I took Advanced Placement English, and my teachers had always spoken very highly of my writing. I’d even written a children’s book when I was in sixth grade that one of them submitted for publication. I thought about deadlines for a moment, from long-range book projects to daily newspapers, and figured something in the mid-point, like a monthly magazine, would suit me best. So I wrote “Journalist” in the blank, and that was it. A star was born!

Of course, that’s a total lie—but something really did start to happen from that day forward. I signed up for my high school newspaper, the Purple Press, and was the editor of it by my senior year, then went on to major in journalism at New Mexico State University. It might be a big party school, but it happens to have an excellent journalism program. I got a job as a reporter at the college paper, The Round-Up, and went on my collegiate way.

About two and a half years into that, however, I got very discouraged and had a hard time reconciling my career choice with my Christian faith. I remember walking across campus one day, praying, “God, I don’t want to be a journalist. The field is full of alcoholics, and they’re all so anti-You!” So I switched my major to, of all things, psychology. (Talk about anti-God!) That lasted until I had to take a course called Experimental Methods, which involves a lot of math. Nothing drives me to my knees faster than math, so I figured it was time to get back to what God was really calling me to do, and began concentrating on journalism again. A job covering NMSU football and basketball as a stringer for the Albuquerque Journal—the largest newspaper in the state—literally fell into my lap, and I started covering games on some of the tightest deadlines known to man.

The last summer before my graduation, the name of the game was all about finding a good internship somewhere—but I was 0 for six because all the newspapers in the area were into affirmative action, and I am not Hispanic. (Though a strong case could definitely be made for hiring a white girl under affirmative action in that area of the country.) One day during the spring semester, I got a phone call from my advisor, who happened to be the head of the journalism department.

“Karla, I’m concerned about you because you’re oh-for-six on internship opportunities, and the only reason is that you’re not Hispanic,” he said. “You make better grades and have more experience than all these other kids who are getting hired.”

“Well, I can’t think of anything else to do except just keep trying,” I told him.

“There’s one paper you might be really interested in,” he told me. “The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California, hires four college interns every summer, and one of them is always in the sports department.”

“That does sounds interesting,” I said. “I’ll have to check it out.”

“I thought you’d say that,” he said. “And that’s why I took the liberty of writing them a letter and signing your name to it. I just wanted you to know about it in case they call you!”

I was too stunned to even tell him how unethical that was. Not that it would have done any good after the fact, anyway. But about a week later, I did get a call from the Press-Enterprise, telling me they’d hired me for the summer.

That was a major turning point in my life. By the time I went back to school in the fall, I’d decided I would just go ahead and be a sportswriter, and if that was the case, Southern California—home to a plethora of professional teams—was the only place worth doing it. So I blanketed the region with my resume, planned a trip back over my Thanksgiving break, and set up about a half-dozen interviews. I told the editors even if they didn’t have a job opening, I would just like to meet with them and hear whatever advice they could offer me.

So that’s what I did. I rented a white Mustang convertible and met with editors in Santa Barbara, Antelope Valley, Pasadena—anywhere I could get somebody to spend time with me. The very last place I visited was The Desert Sun, the daily newspaper in Palm Springs. And as I drove through the mountains, farther and farther away from my boyfriend in Huntington Beach—the guy who at the time covered the Angels for the Press-Enterprise—I thought it was the last place I wanted to work, too. But since I had the appointment, I figured I might as well keep it.

When I walked up to the sports desk, there was just one guy sitting there—Larry Bohannon, the golf writer.

“You must be here about the prep job,” he said.

“What prep job?” I asked. “I’m just here for a meeting.”

As it turned out, the paper had fired the prep sports guy a week earlier for making up quotes and only pretending to go to games. The sports editor liked my resume because I was somewhat familiar with the area already—having spent the summer just 45 minutes away in Riverside—and asked if I could stay long enough to try out for the job. I said no way! I had papers to write, finals to take, back in New Mexico. So we scheduled a tryout for right after graduation instead. When I came back in December, they showed me around the valley, took me to look at apartments, wined and dined me quite a bit, and had me go out to interview a guy at a church about a car racing team he was organizing. I had to write the story in the office, on deadline—while everyone there was bouncing off the walls and having a Christmas party! They figured if I could write under those circumstances, I could handle anything, so they offered me the job. And to paraphrase an old proverb, a job in the hand is worth two on the beach—so I took it.

So that’s how I got started in journalism. Obviously, it’s not where I ended up—I now run a monthly newspaper on education reform for a libertarian think tank in Chicago while freelancing about bodybuilding for Muscle & Fitness magazine and conservative grassroots activism for Citizen. But isn’t that exactly what I said I wanted to do when I was in ninth grade?

The one thing I would really like to say about the beginning of my career, though, is that when I got that job in Palm Springs, I was a Christian, but I wasn’t letting Jesus control my life. In fact, I’d chucked my Christianity into the corner completely because I was tired of feeling like I had to perform well enough for the Lord to love me. I could never be good enough, no matter how hard I tried! So I had decided that I would rather go to Hell in one piece than live my life in two pieces, if that was what Christianity was.

I thought I got the job because I was just so smart and so talented! But three months into it—with my boyfriend 100 miles away in Huntington Beach and my family 1,000 miles away in New Mexico—I was more alone than I’d ever been, and both my job and my attitude sucked. That’s when I was sent out to write a feature story on Lyndee Hovsepian, a sophomore at one of the high schools I covered who’d just qualified for the Olympic swim trials—and during that interview, she and her mother invited me to go to church with them sometime. I said to myself, you know, I might be the biggest screw-up Christianity has ever seen, but I am not completely stupid—and I can tell when it’s time to take care of business.

So I went to church with them the next week and met the rest of the family. As I was walking up the sidewalk, the dad took one look at me, pointed right at me, and said, “You’re an answer to prayer!”

While I inwardly freaked out, thinking, “Man, this guy has been out to lunch a LOT longer than an hour”—I mean, who had ever said anything like that to me in my entire life?—I politely asked him what he meant. He said the family had known for a long time that Lyndee’s talent was going to attract attention, so they’d been praying for the right journalist to come along to write the story. And that person was me.

Long story short—I rededicated my life to the Lord that day. The Hovsepian family basically adopted me. I broke up with my boyfriend and started really growing in the Lord for the first time—coming to realize that I wasn’t in Palm Springs, in the job that I had, because of my own talent or brains. The Lord had simply been orchestrating my steps all that time. And my performance had nothing to do with His love for me. No, I could never be good enough, love God enough, to be saved—so all I could do was rely on His grace and let Him love me. That totally changed my perspective!

About 18 months later, a new guy was hired as one of the assistant city editors at the paper. He was six months out of rehab for—you guessed it!—alcoholism. He asked me what brought me to Palm Springs, and I told him this story. Not too long afterward, he asked Jesus into his heart—and two days after that, the Lord said to me, “That is your husband!” Sure enough, six months later he asked me to marry him, so I said yes. About 18 months into our marriage, he took a job writing for Citizen magazine at Focus on the Family, so we moved to Colorado Springs. He’s now the vice president for media relations there, and I do all my freelance work from home. God has an amazing sense of humor.

Sherri asked me to tell you what my forte is as a writer. I’ve always been very intrigued by crawling around inside other people’s heads and finding out what makes them tick, and then helping them tell their stories. My favorite thing is to tell stories like this one, though I usually find it easier to do when they are other people’s stories and not my own! (They’re easier to edit that way.) So as it turns out, journalism is not as anti-God as I thought it would be in college. If God can use me, He can use anything!

The best advice I can offer anyone is that whatever you do, do your best. Give your heart to the Lord, and let Him orchestrate your steps—and then stand back and watch as He creates art out of your life.

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I’m sure you can tell from the story many of the other reasons I love Karla – she’s hilarious, smart as a whip, and always has the perfect thing to say in any circumstance. It would really be worth your time to pick up Muscle & Fitness Hers, where Karla writes a monthly column. She is a fitness guru, and competes in fitness competitions, so she knows what she’s talking about. She’ll quickly become one of your favorite reads, I’m sure.