 This summer, I'm saying goodbye to my Washington Post Magazine column, "Significant Others," which I've been writing every week for the past 14 years.The move represents a sad but exciting transition in my writing life.
After all those columns and three memoirs about life here on Sweetwater Farm, I got the distinct urge to find out what it might feel like to live life without writing about it all the time. As I wrote in my last book proposal to my editor, “I’m so sick of myself!” I have to think that’s a good thing. My last column for The Post appears July 6th, 2008. (I'll still be writing "Mind Over Matters," my personal-essay column for Ladies' Home Journal.)
My plan is to take the next few years getting back to my roots and focusing hard on my first writing love: other people’s stories. Ordinary people who, once you get to know them, turn out to be extraordinary. These will be big, meaty immersion features that take the reader on adventures into unseen worlds. For instance, I spent four months in a coal mine last year, and I just got back from Alaska, where I got to know the culture of Arctic oil drillers. These and other stories will be chapters in my next book, Hidden America, due out by Putnam in 2010. Some of them have already appeared in magazines such as GQ.
I've set up this Web site so that I can keep in touch with so many readers whom I have come to think of as friends. I hope you'll feel free to email me. Thanks for dropping by.
Best,
Jeanne Marie Laskas
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