As little girl, I wrote stories. I wrote fiction, silly songs, and bad poetry. In the 1980s, at a friends’ birthday sleepover, when camcorders were all the rage, the mother of the birthday girl pointed the camera at me and asked my nine-year-old self what I wanted to be.

“A writer,” I said.

“Oh, you want to be a nerd,” she teased.

Everyone in the video laughed.

After a B.A. in English, a master’s in communication, and part of a PhD in Language and Literature that I left and didn’t finish, I found myself underemployed with a young child. To make ends meet I pieced together blog writing with adjunct teaching for community colleges.

When I found a job as editor of a very small-town newspaper, I grabbed it. I didn’t know AP style, and I had never done newspaper reporting, but this was my chance to really write. I convinced the publisher I could do so by taking a trial run and giving him a sample 500-word story.

That smalltown newspaper turned out to be one of the best career moves I ever made. There’s not a lot of hard news in tiny towns. I mostly tell stories — other people’s stories. And there’s so much freedom in it.

While covering town council meetings and the Western drought are part of the job, the icing on the cake is what I get to add in: the lifestyle pieces.  Children who are raising 4-H animals, a grandmother who completed a successful deer hunt in her 80s, another local woman who made it onto a television baking show, and a couple who built a successful family business selling auto parts.

There’s beauty in the mundane, and a richness too, if you ask the questions that reveal commonality of our humanity and shared experience.

The job gave a foundation to explore other writing work, too, like freelance pieces for magazines, through which I’m able to express my voice even more authentically on subjects dear to my heart, like family, healing arts and horses.

It’s also given me the personal freedom to write creatively, to help my grandmother organize her memoirs as a self-published book that we sold to family and friends.

At the same time, working as a smalltown editor built credibility and helped me develop an online presence, such that I am taken seriously as a writer. I now have the confidence to reach out to bigger publications and pitch stories.

I recommend smalltown news to any aspiring writer. Even if there is no editor job or staff writer position available, ask about freelancing for the local paper. Contributing builds a resume and earns money, and there’s always the joy of pitching ideas related to personal passions.

The AP stylebook is now something you can Google and nothing to get tripped up about. The pandemic has shown smalltown journalists that the newsroom isn’t necessarily needed. Most of us can do our jobs from anywhere.

I’m grateful for my news writing gig, and I encourage others to explore this route — maybe even as a columnist. This avenue has kept me writing while letting me get paid for doing what I love. I can honestly say that I am living my childhood dream.

BIO – Regan Tuttle is editor of The Norwood Post and contributes to Telluride-based magazines and Working Horse Magazine in Colorado. She also writes copy on the side for a small marketing company. To read The Norwood Post visit https://www.telluridenews.com/the_norwood_post/.