John Mark Eberhart has friends in KC
I’ve been making a living writing things for money for a few years, even though I never actually finished my bachelor’s degree. I feel fortunate to be hanging around with the people who have become my best friends over the past two years. So I can’t let it pass unacknowledged that the man who put me on this career path was let go by The Kansas City Star on Monday.
I used to work at The Cup and Saucer on Delaware Street, back when it still existed, and Saturday afternoon bar shifts were typically slow enough to actually talk to customers. John Mark Eberhart and his wife, Sherri, came in for beers while I was working one of those shifts in 2003. They were quietly celebrating the end of Sherri’s most recent round of chemotherapy, which would, sadly, turn out not to be the last. When John Mark mentioned that he was the books editor at The Kansas City Star, we started talking about books and about The Star, and how a city as truly cosmopolitan as Kansas City deserved a books section, like, 10 pages longer than The Star could afford. The Eberharts were charming and funny, and they sat at my bar for an hour and a half.
Then John Mark asked me if I’d like to write something for his section. “Are there any current books you’d like to review?” he said. I had never been published anywhere. Seriously, WHO DOES THAT? As it happened, I’d just read Pattern Recognition, the most recent novel by William Gibson, who had been my favorite writer since I was 17 years old. I told John Mark that I would love to write about the book, and he said, “Unfortunately, we already published a review. But would you like to interview the author?” Which is how it came to pass that I bit off way more than I could chew, experience-wise. He helped me set up a phone interview, and I lived in a state of terror for the next two weeks, during which I re-read Pattern Recognition and Gibson’s first book, Neuromancer, which I’d read over and over as a kid, the way other kids read The Catcher in the Rye.
I managed to get through the interview without embarrassing myself or geeking out too much. Copious note-taking saved me from the disaster of a tape recorder malfunction (also my first, and not the last, a lesson learned early). I sweated over my copy for three days and e-mailed it to Eberhart. His response, a quick one, was amazingly gratifying; he loved the piece and said he was going to try to pay me a little more than he’d initially promised. I remember printing off his e-mail and dropping it out of my apartment window as my friend Lara, an accomplished writer and editor, was walking down the street, so she could read it. The interview was published with many edits but virtually nothing cut; it ran as a half-page in the Sunday books section. I remember being shocked and proud at how much space it was afforded.
Over the next couple of years, he gave me six or seven other assignments, and with those clips, I managed to get freelance work at other publications. Ultimately, C.J. Janovy would make the ridiculous and wonderful decision to hire me as the assistant calendar editor at The Pitch, but if it weren’t for Eberhart’s generosity, encouragement and patience, I’d never have had the nerve to send her my resume. And thanks to him, my first published piece was an interview with my favorite author.
Out of respect for John Mark’s wishes, no negative commentary here about The Star or its corporate parent, McClatchy. The city’s paper of record has been much diminished of late, but somehow it only now feels to me like an aperture has closed, one that used to lead to poetry and humor, to a genuine love of writing and the desire to propagate that sensibility. Dude’s one of the really good ones.
