saltwater coffee + day-old humble pie

Features writing is sometimes dubbed “soft news,” and it can go that way, sure. All heartwarming and feel-good, the we-make-you-smile stories, of, say, the farm-dirt poor family winning the lottery on a crumpled fiver found by the highway, and then buying matriarch Grandma Pearl that custom black Ford F-150 she’d always wanted, from back even before Paw-Paw died, with the jacked-up 34-inch wheels and cherry-red-lit rims, and those fat Flowmaster Outlaws, giving her that deep thunder-rumble at stoplights. Git it, Pearl!

I mean, who doesn’t wanna read about that?

Features are typically longer, the stories often geared toward powerful human-interest moments, toward big personalities, toward the Big Things in Life, and the seemingly small things that suggest big things.

In short, features writing is mostly about people doing neat shit, fun shit, important shit, crazy shit, brand-spanking-new shit, sometimes bad shit, but generally, interesting shit.

Narratively speaking, the good shit.

I worked in features for most of my pro-writing career, back when newspapers of all sizes still blithely roamed the earth like asteroid-unaware dinosaurs. I actually began in features, in 1995, when I stumbled into newspaper work in Asheville, N.C., in less-than-quiet desperation to make a living fresh out of stalled graduate studies in New Orleans. At first it was doing mainly just music features, profiles of performers, since music was something I had, and still have, a passion and a feel for. But as I went along, I started writing about pretty much everything that seemed feature-y. As in the interesting everything. The interesting shit.

The good shit.

Here’s a little of all that.