Elaine Jarvik has probably won more writing awards than any other feature writer in the state. You know this. You know she's great, yet you are not intimidated when you are assigned to interview her, because Elaine Jarvik is not an intimidating kind of person.
In fact, after she spends two days trying to weasel out of the interview, you have to intimidate her, just so you can get it done.DN: OK. Sit down. Right now. Let's get this interview over with.
EJ: I hate this. I hate this. I really didn't want to be interviewed. I'm not very articulate. I am a reporter; I rely on other people to tell me stuff about their lives. I can't remember stuff about my own life.
DN: You were born in Maryland, an only child. When you were young you liked to play catch with your dad and together the two of you listened to baseball on the radio. Your mom always hoped your hair would stay blond and straight, like it was when you were little. But it didn't. It went curly and brown.
You graduated in American studies from Syracuse, and then you thought about going into the Peace Corps but they wanted to send you to Korea and you wanted to go to Brazil because you liked the music so instead you went to graduate school at Northwestern in journalism.
You have two children, Tyler and Kate, whom you adore, and now they have brought you two more people to love - their spouses, Tanya and Bryan - and two grandchildren to love.
You came to the Deseret News in 1972. You left when Tyler was born and then came back, part time, in 1983. You like to play games, and you like to invent games for our readers - like treasure hunts and the annual Itty Bitty Salt Lake City contest.
You took up the drums the year you turned 40. Now you play in a band. You love to drum. You love to write. When did you first know you'd be a writer?
EJ: I feel so silly being interviewed. Well, I discovered in the ninth grade that I had some sort of possibility. My English teacher, Mr. Teunis (he was my favorite teacher), he ranked us as far as our writing ability. I was second, right under Emily Eiselman.
See, my mom had to help me at first, with writing. She would have good ideas.
DN: Like what?
EJ: Like say if the topic was "Who is smarter, men or women?" First of all, she would say, "It's men. . . ." (Laughs) I don't remember where we went from there. (Laughs).
I knew if you had a little catchy beginning you would be OK. Then I had Mr. Teunis again for the 11th grade. He gave us great assignments. Like if Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound and Alexander Poe all met each other, what would the conversation be like? You had to write in the style of those people.
We had to write a poem in the style of T.S. Elliot. Mine was about the Hot Shoppes being a waste-land.
So I liked writing. I liked going into that musty-smelling library at the University of Maryland. I liked sequestering myself with a bunch of notes.
And that's what I still like best about being a journalist. I don't like the reporting so much as the writing. Writing to me is like having all these puzzle pieces and trying to fit them together.
DN: How about ruining people's lives?
EJ: (Big sigh.) We just have such great potential to ruin people's lives. If you are good at what you do, you get people to talk to you. You write it down, and then you wonder whether you should use it. They don't realize how it's going to look in print. It's the thing I'm conscious of. Overly conscious of. I want to protect people. But I don't want to write sappy stories.
I don't write about famous people. Is it the public's right to know about an ordinary person's life? Those are the stories that are best to tell. The ordinary stories that are complex and get into things that are painful.
DN: What do you try to accomplish with the stories of ordinary people?
EJ: (Moans, scrunches up her face, puts her head in her hands, pulls at her hair. She is thinking.) I don't know. It doesn't come out of my mouth. It comes out of my fingers.