This is a speech I gave to my 50th Class Reunion at Harvard College in May, 2024.
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From Newsman to Novelist
I’m a Watergate journalist. I came to my senior year pretty much adrift, no idea of what I wanted to do with my life. I’m class of ’74 but graduated in 1975 after a year off backpacking through Latin America. In the summer of 1974, I was inspired by the Washington Post investigation that led to Nixon’s resignation. It gave me the first hint of a career I might love where I could satisfy my thirst for adventure and also make a difference. I joined the Crimson my senior year and right after college I scored a full-time job at the Associated Press in New York. My Phd in news writing and reporting was under the gaze of grizzled chain-smoking wire service men…they were not impressed with my Harvard credentials. In July 1978 to my surprise, I was sent to Mexico City as a foreign correspondent. Six weeks after arrival there, I was in Managua, Nicaragua at the outset of the Sandinista revolution with gunfire outside my hotel. It was terrifying. But I was bursting with idealism and the belief that I could change the world.
Where did that idealism go? First it slammed into the ugliness of those violent conflicts in Nicaragua and then El Salvador. It was a rude awakening for a naive Harvard graduate. What had been idealism slipped into cynicism. It was made worse by a moderate case of PTSD, caused by seeing colleagues killed and the horrific violence of Salvadoran death squads. The world became a dark place.
I also confronted the limits of short 600 word news stories, especially when any hint of editorializing would be edited out. Rightfully so, but it highlighted how hard it was to actually change people’s minds. It was a lesson that would later fuel my desires to write fiction.
After Central America, my wife Donna, also class of ’74, and I moved to Paris for her job. I was a freelancer at the time, and I began work on a novel based on El Salvador. I still have my rejection letters…somewhere. I was really discouraged and still depressed. Between unpublished fiction and meager freelance fees, I needed to earn a living. We moved back to New York where I looked for work anywhere in journalism. I became a magazine editor and spent the next 25 years of my career, first at Newsweek, then with Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado. Instead of covering wars, I educated myself about wine, food AND cigars, and enlightened people about those pleasures, or vices, if you prefer.
During those years in New York, I also worked with a psychiatrist who helped relieve most of my PTSD. We talked a lot about my frustrated desire to write MY FICTION. One day, now about 20 years ago, he bluntly challenged me, “Do you have anything to say or not?”
I didn’t have an answer.
In the publishing world, there’s a saying: “Everyone has a book inside them … and that’s where it should stay.” With that skepticism toward first time fiction authors and my previous disappointments weighing on me, I asked myself: Did I have something to say? My enthusiasm for my editor’s job had worn thin; the great editor Harold Evans once said you shouldn’t spend more than five years in an editor’s chair or you get stale. I spent 20.
But the urge to write fiction simply wouldn’t go away. In the beginning, I carved out time every day on my train commute between our home and New York City, free of work and interruption for 45 minutes. The plot of my first novel, 10/10, took shape there, a dramatic tale that drew on my struggles with PTSD and my brush with 9/11. The plot explored how trauma changes people’s lives, a story I hoped would touch people, without attention-grabbing headlines.
But I couldn’t finish the book.
In 2014, Donna and I embarked on our next big adventure. We moved to Mexico, in part to get us out of a rut, in part to free me from my 9 to 5. I finished 10/10 after we got there. Why did it take so long to finish my first novel? As long as I still had that demanding editor’s job, fiction writing never topped my priorities. I also kept running up against my previous disappointments and insecurity about my writing. Through multiple drafts and several extensive rewrites, the story kept morphing until it was finally finished in 2018 and published in 2019.
I’m just getting started.
My next novel 20/20 tackles insurrection and the political and social turbulence caused by January 6th, 2021. 20/20 is clear eyed view of segregation and racism. I witnessed those first hand when my high school in north Florida was abruptly desegregated by the Supreme Court my senior year. Today’s extremist ideologies still promote those injustices. Yes, there is a 30/30 outline, an exploration of male friendship and journalism. I admit there’s no 40/40 story yet, but my Harvard experience is a leading contender. 50/50 is a Cain and Abel tale set in Central America, told through the lives of twin brothers on opposite sides of a civil war.
My fiction work illustrates the point of today’s seminar. I do still have something to say. After too many years, and too many hours, fighting pointless Facebook battles over Covid, the former president, and other contentious topics, 20/20 has given me an outlet to counter that frustration.
My voice, these books, are my way to be heard. I also hope that the books, the stories, will outlive me and be read, if only by family members in future generations. They seem more permanent than ephemeral news stories with my byline that would be read without context.
Legacy.
A permanent record.
That’s why I’m writing novels and why I’m not done yet.
GORDON MOTT 