Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had majored in journalism. Oh, the questions. Before I get to those, you should know the backstory.
Real writing for me started with a typewriter, a moose in the snow, and an English teacher who raised my work high in the air for all my classmates to see as if it mattered.
I would say my love for writing stories started in the winter of 1991. I was sitting at the desk in my grandpa’s gun room in Story, Wyoming. Outside, it must have been ten degrees. There was probably three feet of snow on the ground. I lived in the Bighorn Mountains with my grandparents. This was sixth grade. Dad was in prison. No one in my new school had a clue he was a drug dealer back home in Oklahoma. It was a secret I couldn’t tell anyone. Not even Mom, who lived eighty-eight miles east of Story. She had no idea her first child had returned to Wyoming, living undercover. She only learned this in 2025 from her son, who was now forty-seven.
On this day in the gun room, I was writing a story about a moose trekking through Yellowstone National Park on my grandpa’s old typewriter. A pistachio green machine. Slugs of metal, with raised letters on them, that made neat, printed marks on paper. The raised letters were molded in reverse, so they printed correctly on the page. It required that I hit each key with muscle. Typing on this thing for the first time was exciting. It was just me and the page. There were no distractions like those you find on a computer or smartphone. Just as exciting was the fact that this thing was an instant printer. So there I was, going clickety clack, clickety clack. I eventually pulled the paper free and held it up, admiring my work.
That next week, I was never more surprised when Mr. Orr stood at the front of the classroom and announced, “This is excellent writing,” while holding up my assignment. And he didn’t just say it; he meant it.
Orr reminded me of actor Robin Williams in his role as John Keating in “Dead Poets Society,” a coming-of-age drama in which Williams plays an English teacher at an elite, all-boys prep school. Orr didn’t have dark, hairy forearms, but the copper-haired teacher had Williams energy and passion for his craft. Orr expected my best and inspired me to be my best.
Standing there in front of the class, he began to lecture, not at me, not about me, but through me. I don’t recall his exact words, but it was something along the lines of, “Notice how Jeremiah paints the scene. Notice how he doesn’t just tell us what happens. He shows us with imagery.” Or something like that.
I’m not sure my classmates heard the same thing. Or maybe they did. Maybe they just didn’t care. I cared. I wanted to be that moose—shoulders plowing through drifts up to its chest, breath coming out in thick white bursts, hooves cracking the crust of snow as it moved toward the promise of a tasty twig snack. It left a trail you couldn’t miss: churned snow, broken branches, a low, stubborn grunt that said it would get there eventually.
That moment didn’t just make me feel ten feet tall. It woke something up. Not pride exactly, but evidence that I had a way with words. Hearing someone outside my family, someone with authority but not with obligation, say that what I had written was excellent—it never left me. It’s a memory that sticks like pine tar on a Louisville Slugger. It also taught me two things I would forget in my adolescence and then remember as a grown man: first, the desire to create runs deep like an artesian well; second, that recognition is an invitation. It’s the world saying, “You might want to keep doing this.”
I did for a while in junior high, writing for the school paper. I took the sports column, which felt like a dream gig for a kid who loved sports. I reported scores, praised hustle, and learned the discipline of turning a blank page into something coherent by a deadline. Mine was the steady work of paying attention: who showed up, who didn’t, who surprised the crowd. I liked the routine of it—the responsibility. I liked seeing my words in print, proof that they could leave the writing lab and carry other people with them.
Now I’ll confess something: I hated my journalism teacher as much as I loved writing. Ms. Fallible was my worst nightmare at Longfellow Junior High. That’s what I will call her. For starters, she smelled like an ashtray, and if there was one thing guaranteed to turn my stomach, it was cigarette smoke. It clung to her clothes and followed her into the classroom, announcing her arrival before she spoke. Her black hair hung down like a mophead and looked sticky enough to catch flies.
From the first day on, I knew this class would not be about discovering my voice—it would be about surviving hers. In 2025, Mom mailed me every letter I ever wrote her. Thirty-three in total. Thirty-three gems from a boy who believed strongly in his opinions and had not yet read Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. One of these gems was from March of 1994. I was fifteen, going on sixteen, and deeply convinced that the greatest injustice in my life wore high heels and taught journalism at Longfellow.
The main subject of the letter was, you guessed it, Ms. Fallible.
It was tempting—very tempting—to edit what you’re about to read. Add a comma here. Strike a word there. Fix a verb. Rescue a pronoun. Do the decent thing. I resisted. What follows is word-for-word. No adult interference. And yes, it’s cringy in parts. That’s part of the deal for reading this far. You’re not going to stop, are ya? I’m consoling myself right now as I write this, telling myself this letter was merely a text message before texts existed. Or maybe it was expressive writing therapy. You get to decide.
Anyway, I start by telling Mom:
“I got one teacher that gives me problems. She is my journalism teacher. This is my favorite class and I excel real well in the newspaper atmosphere.”
At fifteen, I was already fond of announcing my strengths early, just in case you have doubts. I also liked the phrase newspaper atmosphere, which sounded like I would thrive at the Washington Post.
I continue:
“Each semester we are required to do seven different types of stories. We are only in the 3rd period and I have all my stories done before anyone in class.”
Translation: I am efficient. Also, please note the pride wrapped neatly around that sentence. I didn’t just finish early—I finished before anyone. This mattered deeply.
Then things escalate.
“She is always bugging us to get the stories done. I get mine done. I haven’t had any stories to work on because were almost at golf and track season and she is yelling at me because I’m not working in the lab and she says I get points taken away.”
Here we see my early grasp of injustice, paired with a complete disregard for run-on sentences. I had already completed the assignments, therefore I should not be expected to sit in the lab. This was my logic. It was airtight. To me.
I continue on, now veering into newsroom ethics:
“She is this type of teacher who expects the stories to come out of thin air and they just don’t. I’m one of the best students in the class and the c and d students which are a few girls get to work on gossip everyday which is always making them to be in the lab. Gossip !!! is not news and sports stories are and there are no sports stories out there…”
The triple exclamation points are doing a lot of emotional labor here. So is my early commitment to defining real journalism. Gossip, I had decided, was beneath me. Sports were noble. Facts mattered. Also, subtle sexism, unchecked indignation, and a loose relationship with pluralization were all alive and well.
And then—like any calculating teenager—I go straight to placing the blame on someone else and the long-term consequences:
“…and because of this teacher I probably won’t get a 4.0 and that will hurt my college transcripts.”
This is where the stakes become national. Possibly global. A single journalism teacher stood between me and my future.
Now I already knew my pen was mightier than the sword. All that’s left is the closer.
“I’m going to get her back because I’m going to write a story about the sin of the world. She looks like a sinner.”
The letter ends with a sermon and a detailed plan to fix society, all before the semester ended.
Reading it now, I don’t cringe because I was wrong about everything. I cringe because I was right about one thing, and I lacked the skills to express it like a professional. Clearly, I cared deeply about writing. About fairness. About truth.
Yes, this letter was proof that I hated my journalism teacher.
It was also proof that I already believed in the power of words.
Still, even then, I treated writing like something you do until something more practical shows up. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t protect it. When the bell rang or the season ended, I folded it away.
By the time my sophomore year of high school rolled around, the question wasn’t what do you love to do? It was what professions are projected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations? Liking something was fine. Admirable, even. But adults—well-meaning, experienced, mortgage-holding adults—preferred nouns with ballast. Stability. Benefits. Demand. They liked careers that came with high median pay.
Writing, it seemed, did not chart well.
Healthcare, on the other hand, charted beautifully.
By my senior year, the message became a chorus. Healthcare is secure. Logical. Safe. There will always be jobs in healthcare. People will always get sick. Hospitals don’t close. Records must be kept. Code assignments must be accurate. The future, apparently, loved organization. And Health Information Management sat right at the intersection of need and order. It was the field that alphabetized the industry.
That appealed to me.
HIM promised systems. Rules. Accuracy. A right way and a wrong way. There was comfort in knowing that something either matched the documentation or it didn’t. The code was right, or it wasn’t. The chart was complete, or it wasn’t. I could point to the work and say, There. That’s done.
Writing didn’t offer that kind of certainty. Writing asked questions and then waited. Writing argued back. Writing made you stare at a blank page that refused to care about your intentions. HIM, by contrast, cared deeply about your intentions—as long as they aligned with policy.
So I chose it.
I didn’t slam a notebook shut and declare I was abandoning art for a 401(k) match. I simply did what a lot of sensible people do at eighteen or nineteen: I picked the thing that made the most sense on paper. I told myself I could always write later. Nights. Weekends. Someday. Writing would wait. It always had.
And that’s the cost right there—postponement.
I didn’t stop loving words. I just stopped prioritizing them. I treated writing the way you treat a good friend, you assume will understand when you don’t call for a while. You mean to get back. You really do. Life just fills in the space faster than expected.
Health Information Management gave me a career I could explain in one sentence. Or if I were talking to my grandpa, it would require an afternoon. To his dying breath, he thought I was a glorified paper pusher. In most people’s eyes, HIM gave me legitimacy. It gave Mom and Dad peace of mind. It gave me a paycheck and a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood. And in return, it asked for my attention to detail. It asked me to believe that precision mattered more than curiosity.
At the time, that felt reasonable. Responsible, even.
Looking back, I don’t see that choice as a mistake entirely.
Alongside becoming an expert in acquiring, analyzing, and protecting digital and traditional medical information vital to providing quality patient care in acute-care settings (hospitals), I learned to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.
That skill showed up everywhere. Presentations had to make sense to rooms full of people who didn’t want to be there. Proposals had to earn attention fast or die at committee. Video training scripts had to explain complex rules without sounding like they were written by someone who enjoyed explaining rules. Every word had to justify its spot on the page. There was no room for cleverness unless it helped comprehension. No space for decoration unless it served the point.
And then there were the letters.
Few writing assignments sharpened my instincts like informing a physician—politely, clearly, and without drama—that his admitting privileges and ability to schedule surgery cases had been temporarily suspended due to incomplete medical records. That sentence alone could start World War III if mishandled. Tone mattered. I learned quickly how to deliver hard news without sounding smug, apologetic, or threatening. Sorta. I learned that the difference between cooperation and resistance often came down to a single word or phrase.
Memos, too, became adrenaline rushes. Not the dry, bureaucratic kind people imagine, but tight, purposeful documents that had to move information through an organization without distortion. A good memo didn’t just inform; it traveled. It landed on desks, got forwarded, sparked conversations, and debates. It had to be clean enough to survive repetition. I liked that challenge. I liked the satisfaction of getting something right and knowing it would hold up under pressure.
Somewhere along the way, without my noticing, writing stopped being something I missed and started being something I practiced. I wasn’t writing essays or stories. I wasn’t chasing bylines. But I was shaping language to do work. Real work. Writing that had consequences. Writing that couldn’t afford to be sloppy.
It turns out there’s a certain poetry in restraint. In choosing the shortest path between two ideas and trusting it to carry the weight. Health Information Management didn’t ask me to abandon writing. It trained me to respect it. To understand that words, like medical records, matter most when they’re accurate, timely, and impossible to misunderstand, or at least that was the goal. I didn’t always get it right.
I didn’t call myself a writer then. But I was writing every day. And slowly, sentence by sentence, the blank screen and I were finding our way back to each other—this time with rules, purpose, and a deadline.
Along with the title Director of Health Information Management, I was also the Privacy Officer—basically a librarian with a ring of keys.
In reality, it meant investigating HIPAA incidents, impermissible disclosures, and the human urge to click on a record that is absolutely, unequivocally not yours to open. Nosy Nancys (a.k.a. serial snoopers). Curious coworkers. The occasional “I was just helping” defense, delivered with the confidence of someone who has not read the policy they signed.
My job was to follow the trail. Who accessed what. When. From where. For how long. A digital breadcrumb hunt through audit logs that never lied, only waited. The system remembered everything. I simply had to ask the right questions.
And then came the interviews.
Which I never called interrogations—though I knew better.
There is an art to sitting across from someone who knows they did something wrong but hasn’t yet decided whether to admit it. An art to silence. To let the story arrive half-formed, then watch it correct itself. An art to asking the same question three different ways and hearing three different answers.
Every interview had a beginning, a middle, and—if I was patient—a reveal.
I documented everything. Meticulously. Objectively. No adjectives unless they earned their place. No drama. Just timelines, quotations, and the tension between what was said and what the audit trail showed. Writing as evidence. Writing that had to hold up for six years to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in Washington, DC, when memories softened, and stories changed.
Sometimes the work ended there.
Sometimes it didn’t.
Sometimes I had to notify patients—strangers whose lives I briefly entered through a letter that began, We regret to inform you… There is a peculiar weight to explaining, in plain language, that someone you trusted peeked. That your information traveled where it shouldn’t have. That privacy, once breached, doesn’t un-breach—it only gets accounted for.
It was compliance work, yes. Policy-driven. Regulation-heavy.
But underneath it all, it was narrative.
Every incident was a story with characters, motives, omissions, and consequences. Every interview was a dialogue. Every report was an attempt to tell the truth clearly enough that it could not be misunderstood—or rewritten later.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being trained.
To listen closely.
To notice inconsistencies.
To respect silence.
To write with precision because words mattered.
To understand that the most interesting parts of a story are rarely volunteered.
HIM taught me order. Privacy taught me people.
And somewhere between audit logs and interview notes, between policy language and humans being humans, I learned how to write in a way that could withstand scrutiny—by regulators, by attorneys, by time.
Which, it turns out, was excellent preparation for becoming a paid writer.
Every so often—usually while standing at the gas pump or on one of my evening walks—the question clears its throat.
What if?
What if I’d chosen journalism as my major?
It doesn’t accuse. It just leans against the doorframe of my life, arms crossed, patient as ever, waiting for me to notice it again.
I picture the college first. Perhaps I would have attended the University of Missouri, where Walter Williams started the world’s first school of journalism in 1908. There, I would have learned my profession through the Missouri Method, which provides practical, hands-on training in real-world news media and strategic communication agencies. The school has a reputation for producing some of the best prepared graduates to work and contribute to their organizations from their first day on the job. I like the sound of that.
Or maybe I would have fancied Boston University—the kind of place where student reporting racks up regional Emmys and even the occasional Pulitzer Prize.
Wherever it was, the newsroom would be on the third floor of a brick building. My desk would be scarred by decades of elbows. I’d have a spiral notebook fat with quotes. Deadlines all the time.
Then comes the first job. It’s always a small-town paper in my head. Because that’s where you earn your stripes. I’m covering city council meetings that run long. Writing obituaries for people I never met. Cops. Court proceedings. School board drama.
I learn to write fast while writing well. To get names right and narrative tighter. I learn that silence is a tool. And that people will tell me more when I ask questions that draw out the most vivid and interesting parts of their lives. I learn that the real story sometimes lives in the aside.
And what would I have written?
That’s the part that keeps changing.
Some days, I see myself chasing hidden problems and truths, racial injustice, corruption and abuse of power, or corporate wrongdoing. Investigative journalism. The long game. Documents stacked high. Woodward and Bernstein whispering from the bookshelf. Follow the money. The thrill of finding one buried fact in some dark, dingy basement. Flying across the country to corner someone in a bar. The satisfaction of accuracy.
Other days, I know better. I’d have drifted toward people. Profiles. Human-interest pieces. The ones readers remember forever. Gay Talese is sitting at the bar, not asking questions, just noticing. Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. A story about a man that’s actually about an ecosystem orbiting him. I’ve always loved that trick. Say one thing. Reveal another.
Then the industry shifts. It always does in this thought experiment. Newsrooms thin out. Desks empty. Layoffs arrive with cardboard boxes and brave speeches. Print shrinks. Digital expands. Everyone pretends they saw it coming.
Do I survive it?
Some versions of me do. Some don’t.
There’s freelancing in there somewhere. Pitches sent into the void. Courage dressed up as confidence. Fear pretending to be practicality. The math never quite works, but somehow always working enough. I tell myself I’d have adapted. Learned the game. Learned how to keep going when the byline didn’t pay next month’s rent.
But the real question—the one that won’t die—is simpler.
Did I have the nerve to bet on myself?
Not skills. Nerve.
The skills are there. But nerve makes me send the pitch. Nerve lets me miss a paycheck and still call it a plan. Nerve keeps me chasing the next big feature story.
I didn’t choose journalism. Or maybe I did, just sideways. The reporting instinct followed me anyway. The listening. The interviews. The obsession with getting it right. The belief that stories matter because people do.
The road I didn’t stay on never disappears. It just becomes a mirror I walk past from time to time.
I don’t linger long.
But I nod.
Respect.
Creative writing came back into my life in the most unexpected way. It slipped in through a side door. The door was labeled Gratitude. I wanted to do something special to honor Dad, so I started writing a short story in 2009. It wasn’t a memoir, though it borrowed freely from my childhood growing up below the poverty line. The story was about a kid from Brooklyn, New York, who dreamed of playing pro baseball.
The father in the story mattered most to me.
He was a single dad like mine. Blue-collar. Hard worker. He believed in his son’s dreams. Never warned him to be careful with hope. He didn’t promise success, but he never planted seeds of doubt. That father was modeled after my own. Dad never told me I couldn’t or shouldn’t pursue my dreams, goals, and passions—not baseball, not writing, not golf, not my career in HIM, not anything. He encouraged me to swing for the fences every time.
The story became a place to explore that inheritance.
I titled it Achieve It: How to Think and Live Big Dreams. A bold title. Still, I finished it. Printed it. Held it in my hands. I was pleased with the work.
After sitting on the story for a while, I started to imagine it inspiring thousands of youth baseball players across the country.
With the odds stacked against me, I mailed a copy to Dr. Ben Carson, one of the world’s foremost pediatric neurosurgeons. At that time, he was still treating patients at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I wanted his endorsement so badly. You see, he’s one of my all-time heroes. In 1987, Dr. Carson made medical history with an operation to separate a pair of Siamese twins.
Dr. Carson and I did have a few things in common. Like me, he was raised in a single-parent household by his mother, Sonya. He also knew poverty as a child being raised in the slums of Detroit. As a young boy, he loved reading, which would help change the course of his life. Not to mention, Dr. Carson valued the pursuit of an education like nothing else in this world, and there was a plot twist in my story that I thought would resonate with the doctor.
But he didn’t know me. There were no LinkedIn connections. No introductions. No reason for a reply. Just my letter expressing my big dream. A little story from a nobody living in New Mexico. A lot of hope and prayers.
Three weeks passed. Then one day, an envelope arrived with the postmark Baltimore, Maryland. It was my self-addressed stamped envelope.
This can’t be him, I thought. This is probably his assistant. Or a form letter. Or a polite thank-you written by someone else’s hand.
I opened it hoping for the best, but expecting the worst.
Inside was an endorsement handwritten by the man himself. In utter shock, I sat there, reading it again and again. His words added weight to the work. I wish I could say the book is now in the hands of thousands of youth. The way I expressed my dream to Dr. Carson years ago. It’s still a work in progress. A dream not yet achieved. To me, each no is a stepping stone, putting me closer and closer to my goal. At some point, I’m bound to succeed. On matters such as this, I relate to what Michael Jordan said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Fail, fail, fail until I succeed. I miss 100% of the shots I don’t take. That’s all there is to say about that.
I found other ways to express my creativity while in Roswell. This time, the door was labeled Office Olympics. At Eastern New Mexico Medical Center, my department decided we needed to inject some fun into Health Information Professionals Week. Something competitive. Something ridiculous. We’d face off in a series of challenges that had everything to do with bragging rights. Paper airplane distance throw. Trash can basketball. Paper clip challenge. And so on.
I assigned myself to write about it. My objective was to garner some recognition for the department. I wrote short pieces about that day’s competition, who did what, and emailed them out to the entire hospital. I exaggerated shamelessly. I invited the hospital to laugh along with us.
Something happened.
People started commenting:
“That was so funny, Jeremiah.”
“You have a way with words.”
“Are you going to write more?”
Encouraged by the positive response, I later pitched an idea to the Administration team. Employee feature stories. They approved. Green light! I interviewed employees across the organization, then returned to my desk and wrote the profiles. The articles traveled. They were forwarded, printed, and taken home. Some of my pieces followed a person through their workday. Others uncovered interesting second lives hiding in plain sight. I learned that people didn’t need much coaxing to reveal who they really are and what matters to them. Just a few good questions to get them talking.
I was officially a writer again. Well, sorta. I had my day job at the hospital to do. In 2015, my family and I moved back to Rexburg, Idaho, where I assumed my old role as Director of Health Information Management at Madison Memorial Hospital. The irony of this. I said I was never going back to Iceberg! God had other plans for me.
It took some time, but I was eventually writing similar employee profile stories for the hospital. Same effect. I was officially a writer again, alongside doing my regular job duties.
One day in October 2023, my writing went in an entirely different direction when the hospital CEO came to my office. She asked me if I’d be willing to write the career history of a retiring physician, except this wasn’t the kind of retirement you are thinking of. I was told the subject, an OB-GYN, had just received a terminal diagnosis. He had to be in his early 50s, was my best guess. I thought, He’s too young. I didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely.”
That evening, I drove home slower than usual with the music off. My thoughts were about the doctor. What does a man think when he hears the words terminal? Was it an aggressive cancer? Or did it have a name I’d never heard? Something that specialists discuss in hushed tones.
I wondered how long he had known. Whether the news arrived all at once or crept in through a series of tests. I wondered what he told his family first.
At one of the stoplights, I imagined how many lives had passed through his hands.
And now this.
I thought about timing. About how unfair it is that a career built on ushering life into the world could be brought to a premature ending. I thought about what I would ask him. Where do you begin when someone is living in terminal time?
By the time I pulled into my driveway, one thing had settled with clarity. This wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility entrusted to me. If he was willing to sit with me and talk, then my job was simple and exacting: to listen well and write well.
Some writing asks for witticism.
This kind asked for unusual care.
A few days later, I texted the doctor. He said yes, and we met the next morning.
I think my first question was, “Can you tell me about your childhood and early upbringing?” We progressed through his early years and the grind of medical school, then I asked questions about his twenty-one years in medicine. I don’t recall if our talk about his diagnosis was after this or earlier. But my first question on that subject was: When did you realize something was not right, health-wise? He told me, then revealed the answer to the question that was weighing heavily on my mind. The diagnosis. His was ALS, otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. This nervous system disease weakens muscles and impacts physical function. My heart sank. I knew this one. And not just because of the Ice Bucket Challenge.
In July of 2020, five months into the pandemic, I began experiencing jerking in my right thumb that lasted several weeks. I was also getting fatigued in both upper extremities. This was intermittent with activity. I noticed it when I was doing things like brushing my teeth or shaving my head. The worst was “fasciculations” throughout my entire body. Never heard of fasciculations? No problem. I’m going to tell you. Fasciculations are muscle twitching. Did I already say everywhere? Yes, everywhere.
Once I learned the word fasciculation, I couldn’t unlearn it. It followed me around everywhere. It settled into my vocabulary like an uninvited houseguest who refuses to leave and keeps rearranging the furniture.
The twitching didn’t hurt. That was part of the problem. Pain would have been easier. Pain flares and retreats. This was different. This was a quiet, relentless commentary running beneath my days. A flicker here. A jump there. A reminder—constant, unpredictable, intimate.
I noticed it everywhere because it was everywhere. Arms. Legs. Calves performing their own Morse code. Even muscles I had never consciously acknowledged before decided to introduce themselves. Yes, including my butt cheeks. A sentence I never imagined writing, yet here we are.
At first, I did what any rational adult does when faced with unfamiliar symptoms: I ignored them for an hour, then I went straight to Google. Surely this was stress. Dehydration. Too much caffeine. Not enough sleep. Or too much pandemic news. The body, after all, had been through a lot in 2020. We all had.
But the symptoms persisted. Weeks passed. The twitching kept time with nothing in particular. That’s when worry stopped knocking and moved in permanently.
I carried it everywhere. To work. To the grocery store. To bed. I carried it into conversations. I carried it through the middle of the night, where it grew louder in the dark, as worries tend to do.
With Dr. Google by my side, I knew just enough to be dangerous—to myself. Acronyms floated to the surface uninvited. Neurological words I wished I didn’t recognize suddenly felt personal. Too personal.
Those damn twitches persisted. Faithfully. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. A small physical sensation carrying an oversized question. And unanswered questions, I had learned, are the hardest kind to live with.
I started with my primary care physician. Then by November, I graduated to a neurologist in Idaho Falls. Specialists, I’ve learned, speak in sentences that sound like conclusions.
The neurologist performed an electromyography and a nerve conduction study. An EMG and NCS, for those who love acronyms. These tests measure the electrical activity of muscles and nerves, which sounds reasonable until needles are involved. Different ones. A needle’s gauge refers to the diameter of the needle—the higher the number, the thinner the needle. Needle EMG uses very fine needles, typically ranging from 26 to 31 gauge, compared with the thicker 22–25 gauge needles used for intramuscular injections and the 21-gauge needle most commonly used for routine blood draws.
Unfortunately, the needle used in an EMG is so thin it can’t just slip in, take a reading, and politely exit. It has to be moved around inside the muscle to sample enough territory, which is where the extra discomfort comes in. Injection and blood-draw needles, by contrast, enter the body and stay put, minding their own business. The EMG needle, however, is interactive. It roams. And just to make things more interesting, I was instructed to tighten my muscles while this happened, so the neurologist could record what my muscles did when they were working—something I would have preferred to demonstrate under less needle-intensive circumstances.
The results came back clean. No spontaneous activity. No abnormal motor unit action potentials in any extremity. On paper, this was excellent news. Healthy skeletal muscle, at rest, stays electrically silent. The less it says, the better.
The neurologist delivered his verdict.
“I don’t find you that interesting,” he said.
In medical terms, uninteresting is high praise. It means your body is not doing anything worthy of a journal article or a conference presentation. It is, in fact, behaving itself.
Still, the comment landed with a peculiar mix of relief and frustration. I had spent months feeling like my body was staging a rebellion, and here a specialist was telling me that nothing bad was happening.
The twitching persisted. The thumb jerking persisted. Through December. Then January of the next year. February. March. April. I was scared shitless that ALS was coming after me. My neurologist had missed something. I just knew it. The thumb jerking was bad enough, I thought, let’s get a second opinion. So off I went to the Mountain West Region’s only academic medical center, the Clinical Neurosciences Center at the University of Utah. My second neurologist’s opinion: low probability of developing ALS. Danger abated. Or was it?
By the time I sat down to interview the doctor for his story, I was three years into my ALS scare, muscles still twitching, and I still didn’t feel like I was out of the woods on this one. I have to admit that when “ALS” left the doctor’s lips, I thought, What are the #%$@?!% odds that I’d be sitting here doing what I’m about to do? Then I thought, Is this some ominous sign? I bit my lip. No emotion. A novice writer in this situation would have been unable to resist talking about himself and his story. Talk about wasting time. I was a skilled professional now, so that didn’t happen. Not a word. The rule is shut up and listen. It takes skill to fade into the background and let subjects talk. To the doctor, I was faceless. You have to be, if you’re going to do this kind of work the right way.
We sat together for ninety minutes. I feverishly took notes and later turned them into a 3,000-word narrative, which was presented to the doctor that evening at a medical staff gathering.
Thirty-five days after we met, EastIdahoNews.com reported on Dr. John Allred, age 53. His symptoms came on over the span of about a year and a half, including fatigue and loss of function. He received his official diagnosis that September and a confirmatory diagnosis at the University of Utah on October 30. He died a few months later. He was 54.
This is why I do what I do.
My passion for preserving stories comes from knowing, firsthand, the pain of an untold story. My own grandfather, my hero, died without his life story written. I was the writer in the family, but I let that opportunity slip by, and it still haunts me. There will never be a book to hand my boys to guide future generations. That regret is heavy, and I never want another family to experience it.
Determined not to repeat the same mistake, I started with Dad. For three months, every Wednesday night, we talked by phone. The following week, I wrote a chapter of his life and mailed it to him for review and approval—the Pony Express way. Dad doesn’t own a computer or a smartphone. He doesn’t even have an answering machine. Our rhythm held, week after week, until I placed a 158-page hardcover in his hands.
I did the same for Mom, except we met early Sunday morning. I titled her biography, Wild Child. She was that, running away twelve times, sometimes gone for months, thumbing rides from California to Washington, hiding in plain sight, and carving freedom out on her own terms.
Some of their stories surprised me, but what surprised me most was how long they’d gone unasked. Dad spent long hours working in construction, paying bills, getting me to my extracurricular activities, and staying upright. In the process, whole chapters disappeared behind our routine. I grew up thinking I knew Dad because I knew his rules, his habits. But I didn’t know the private decisions, the close calls, the versions of themselves that existed before I showed up. Those only surfaced when I made time, asked real questions, and then listened for the answers.
After writing Allred’s career history and another retiring physician’s story, I formed my writing LLC at the end of 2023 to put a wall between my freelance business and personal assets. Today, I call myself a memoir ghostwriter, biographer, and freelance writer. The labels matter less than the work itself: listening and writing well. I care about this work because untold stories don’t just disappear; they leave families with questions, not answers.
My writing took yet another turn when actor Gene Hackman died in 2025. A story about him had been sitting in my back pocket for ten years. I guess it was waiting for the right moment. Stories are like that. Timing is everything.
I’ve learned that not every story wants to be told. Some need space and time. Some require the subject to be finished speaking. This was one of those.
When I returned to Idaho, one of my employees, Jody Cottle, told me her Hackman story. During her college days in the 1980s, she was the hostess who greeted the actor at the Raintree Restaurant located in a unique octagon-shaped building with large panoramic windows. What fascinated me about this story was what happened after Hackman asked to see the wine list. Because Rexburg, predominantly populated by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was a dry town, there was no wine list for the two-time Oscar winner. That didn’t stop the general manager’s son from jumping in his sports car and racing to Idaho Falls for a bottle of wine.
After the news of Hackman’s passing broke, the story felt ready.
First, I needed to convince Cottle to grant me an official interview. That took some persuading. Not arm-twisting per se, just convincing her why the story mattered now and how it would give the world another good example of what a great human being Hackman was, and honor the Walker family, who managed the restaurant. After some humming and hawing, Jody agreed.
I already knew where I wanted the story to appear: EastIdahoNews.com, the No. 1 news website in eastern Idaho and the only locally-owned news operation in the state. The story belonged close to where it happened.
Next came the pitch. My email query to the managing editor began with a question:
Would East Idaho News be interested in a piece titled “The Night Rexburg Didn’t Have a Bottle of Wine for Gene Hackman”?
The strength of the question was its economy. In one sentence, it offered a headline, a place, and a promise. A sentence stripped down to its barest bones. I’ve always gravitated to that approach in writing. As Leonardo da Vinci put it, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Five hours later, I got a bite.
“Jeremiah,” the email began. “That sounds interesting. Provided the sourcing is sound, I think we could work something out. Why don’t you give me a call today?”
The editor liked that the piece would serve as a snapshot of the area’s past, local culture, and the unexpected ways small-town Idaho intersected with a larger-than-life figure. I told him the piece would mix history, local character, and a touch of humor to engage readers who appreciate nostalgia and celebrity anecdotes.
I should say here that it had been thirty-one years since I had written “news.” While I was well practiced in building scenes and following a story wherever it wandered, news stories don’t wander. The managing editor gave me clear instructions: Open with what had just happened—Gene Hackman’s death—and then move backward. Identify your source early. I appreciated him taking a second to refresh me. It saved me from having to revise the lead.
Satisfying those requirements, I then moved on to the fun part. Constructing my opening scene. If I were writing a front-page feature for the Wall Street Journal, I would start with a scene and characters to catch reader interest. This is what I wrote:
Looking out the window for arriving patrons, Cottle, a Ricks College student, didn’t recognize the figure approaching from the direction of the Best Western Cottontree Inn in the dark.
It wasn’t until Hackman, wearing a turtleneck and jacket, walked through the door and stood right in front of Cottle that she recognized the Hollywood star, who was still riding high on the box-office success of the first two “Superman” movies.
“My first thought was, ‘I know who this guy is,’” Cottle says. “‘You’re Lex Luthor.’”
That quote is my favorite from the whole bunch. I consider it the juiciest piece of fruit from my conversation with Cottle. On that night, she saw Lex Luthor, the greatest criminal mind of his time. Not Gene Hackman, the Hollywood star. It tells you his performance as a cold, power-hungry villain was mesmerizing.
This raised a question: Who was really sitting at the four-top in the corner with a clear view of Yellowstone Highway? The calculating mastermind? Just another Hollywood figure with attitude and a big ego?
The staff at Raintree found Hackman to be calm, down-to-earth, and approachable. They were all just people to Hackman, not servers.
“We all went over to talk to him,” Cottle says. “He was very relaxed and not at all impatient, even though he wasn’t going to have dinner for an hour.”
Cottle estimated Hackman’s visit lasted two hours.
While she speculated that perhaps Hackman was in the area to visit one of the nearby National Parks, after the story was published, the East Idaho News Facebook page lit up with comments and the answer to the question I was dying to know.
Hackman came to Idaho for a week (or two) to paint with Russian artist Sergei Bongart at his art school in the small town of Thornton, a few miles south of Rexburg. The Ricks College Scroll reported in 1980 that 200 people from around the world came to Thornton each June to attend Bongart’s workshops, including many famous and successful people.
But why eastern Idaho?
His wife and student Patricia LeGrande Bongart explained in another article I found online: “His heart took a big leap when he visited this part of Idaho and found it was the same latitude as his home in Russia [Ukraine]. There were magpies in the trees, lush lilac bushes and the same animal life. At last he felt at home!”
Bongart was known for his colorful palette and bold “bravura” brushwork; his paintings were a synthesis of the traditional academic training he received in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine; Prague; Vienna; and Munich.
What I did not know about Hackman until after his death was his parallel life as an avid art collector, writer, painter, and patron. In November 2025, more than 400 objects from his estate headed to auction, ranging from his own paintings and sketchbooks to significant works by modern greats.
I tip my hat to East Idaho News for finding all the cool pictures sprinkled throughout the story. At the top of the article’s page, my heart skipped a beat seeing Gene Hackman from 1972, inset in a picture of the Raintree Restaurant from the 1980s. What came next was a 1978 video clip of Superman confronting Lex Luthor, running for seven minutes and thirty seconds. Next were two more pictures of the Raintree. And finally, we see Hackman smiling as the Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards in 1993.
The greatest challenge about telling the Hackman story and the most enjoyable was finding the story within the story. David Fryxell calls it finding the David. Just like Michelangelo needed to find the block of marble that contained the David within it, I needed to find the Hackman. Writing isn’t hard when I know where I’m going. If you paid attention in grade school, you know where I’m going with this. Outlining baby! Now, before you scream in sheer terror, the words English Teacher’s Revenge! I want you to hear me out, or rather, my friend Jon Franklin.
In his book, Writing For Story, Franklin says: “In telling yourself you can’t outline, what you’re really saying is that you can’t think your story through, and if that’s actually the case—which I seriously doubt—then you’d better give up your writing ambitions before you become successful enough for people to discover that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Franklin’s line lands like a well-aimed elbow to the ribs because it’s funny, yes—but mostly because it’s true. We dress up our resistance to outlining as temperament or artistry, when it’s usually just avoidance. “I don’t outline” sounds noble until you translate it: I don’t want to sit still long enough to decide what this thing is actually about. Franklin isn’t being cruel; he’s being surgical. He’s reminding us that thinking is the job. The sentences are the reward. An outline isn’t a prison—it’s a map. And maps don’t ruin the journey; they keep you from wandering around in circles, calling it exploration. Once I stopped treating structure like an enemy and started seeing it as a badass collaborator, the writing got lighter, faster, and—ironically—freer. The marble was already there. The outline just showed me where to strike.
Franklin continues: “Obviously, if you can’t think your story through you can’t write it convincingly. That’s why I so smugly assert that Hemingway, Steinbeck and Shakespeare used outlines. I’ve read their stuff, and it has integrity—that quality of all hanging together, and being an interrelated organic whole. Integrity in a story is something you just don’t get unless you did a workmanship job of thinking your story through in the first place.”
Franklin sharpens the point here and then calmly twists the knife. He’s not name-dropping Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Shakespeare to intimidate; he’s doing it to end the argument. Integrity, as he uses the word, isn’t moral uprightness—it’s structural honesty. Everything belongs. Nothing rattles. No spare parts. A story with integrity feels inevitable, as if it couldn’t have happened any other way, and that feeling doesn’t come from vibes or talent or caffeine. It comes from thinking. From deciding, ahead of time, what matters and what doesn’t. Franklin’s genius is in saying the quiet part out loud: readers can tell when a writer is guessing. They can feel it when the story is wandering, when scenes are added because they’re clever instead of necessary. The great writers didn’t wing it; they constructed it. They knew where they were going, and that knowledge freed them to focus on voice, rhythm, and surprise. Integrity isn’t accidental. It’s earned—one hard, honest decision at a time.
The Hackman outline began to grow organically. I found myself filling in the gaps here and there, seeing transitions, one idea leading to the next, structuring the overall theme of the story. None of this would have been possible if I didn’t know my material, unearthed by research and my interviews.
In total, I delivered 814 power-packed words that were both entertaining and revealing. A story I never would have imagined, as a kid, that I’d one day be the one to tell.
The question lingers. What if I’d gone into journalism?
Today, I think there’s a better question.
What if timing was the point?
I used to think a calling was something you either answered on time or missed forever. But that idea gives fate far too much credit for punctuality. Callings don’t run on schedules. They wait. Sometimes they watch you wander around in the desert like Moses for forty years, learning things you couldn’t have learned any other way.
I didn’t miss journalism. I grew into the kind of writing that life was preparing me for.
My path taught me how to listen, how to ask, how to get out of the way of a good story. My path taught me patience. It taught me that stories don’t always announce themselves as stories. Some arrive disguised as conversations. I didn’t chase those moments. I noticed them.
Writing well, I learned, isn’t about the journalism degree or whether my name sits above or below the fold. It’s about confidence, enjoyment, intention, and integrity. Writing for me is about preservation. It’s about walking into someone else’s life and saying: This mattered. You mattered. Let’s not lose this.
These days, blank pages don’t scare me. I know how to fill them. I’ve earned that confidence the long way around. What keeps me up—what keeps me tossing and turning in the middle of the night is the thought of a story not being told in time.
So no, journalism wasn’t the point.
Readiness was.
Listening was.
Showing up when the story finally said, Now.
That’s not a missed calling.
That’s full circle.
Word Count: 8,440
Here are six “writing” takeaways from this chapter:
The Beginning
1. Start with a scene, not a summary
I didn’t tell you I loved writing—I put you in a gun room in Story, Wyoming, with a pistachio-green typewriter and a moose in the snow.
Try This: Open your memoir with a vivid moment—temperature, texture, sound. Drop us into a specific day your life quietly changed.
2. Reveal vulnerability early
“Dad was in prison.” No buildup. No dramatics. Just truth. That honesty creates trust fast.
Try This: Name the tension you were living with at the time. What secret, fear, or uncertainty shaped that season?
The Middle
3. Let conflict expose character
My teenage letter about my journalism teacher reveals ego, insecurity, ambition, and belief in words. The conflict deepens the narrative.
Try This: Include a moment where you were wrong, immature, or misunderstood. Growth is more compelling than perfection.
4. Show how life trained you—even when you thought you’d detoured
Health Information Management wasn’t a writing abandonment; it was writing boot camp. Precision. Tone. Listening. Consequence.
Try This: Ask: What skills was I unknowingly developing? Reframe your “detours” as preparation.
The End
5. Turn experience into reflection, not moralizing.
I move from “What if?” to “What if timing was the point?” That shift elevates the story from autobiography to insight.
Try This: Resist summarizing the moral. Add one more lived moment that deepens the theme, and let readers connect the dots.
6. Close the loop—echo the beginning with earned clarity.
The chapter begins with wondering about journalism. It ends with readiness, listening, and full circle. That symmetry gives the story integrity.
Try This: Revisit your opening tension at the end. Answer it differently than you would have at the start.
