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Pat
Arnow |
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Crouching on the floor of City Hall waiting for a dignitary to move his hand and look alert, that’s how Pat likes to spend her time these days. She’s been taking pictures for The Chief, the New York civil employees’ weekly and some of the city's unions. Now that’s fun.
Pat has dug into the city deeper than the grime on the windowsill. It wasn’t always this way. A native of Chicago,Pat and her husband Steve spent 21 years in the South. She loved the region--hiking, Southern writers, the food -- biscuits, grits, barbecue, cornbread, hush puppies, iced tea…(but she does digress when it comes to food) -- and being called "hon" by strangers.
In Huntington, W.Va., Pat graduated from Marshall University, helped start the city's first domestic violence shelter, and created public information programs for a mental health center.
In East Tennessee, as editor of Now and Then, a magazine about Appalachia, Pat learned about mountain politics, arts, history, and culture. She came to appreciate the complexities of the region--and the job. As editor of a university-based magazine (East Tennessee State), she became production manager, designer, publicist, proofreader, writer, photographer, researcher, and supervisor of interns and volunteers.
Moving to Durham, N.C., to edit Southern Exposure, the venerable hell-raising journal of Southern politics and culture, Pat found the broad region of the South an even more complex and compelling region for study and reporting. She published investigative reports on the burning of black churches in the South, on the impact of the property rights movement, censorship of the arts, and campaign finance abuses.
She went on to work as culture editor of In These Times, an alternative newsmagazine (once called "The Socialist Weekly") covering national and international politics and culture. She also wrote articles, reviews, and interviews for newspapers, magazines and the Britannica.com website.
Just before the turn of the century (she loves that phrase), Pat and her husband came to New York on vacation. They had such a good time, they sold everything in North Carolina and moved to the Lower East Side.
After years of working in the left-wing, alternative, and academic press, Pat was thrilled to land a job as a research editor at Reader's Digest. Forget being a big dog for a magazine published by a nonprofit. As a fact checker at a behemoth publisher, she made a living wage.
But even behemoths get the blues. Publishing was in decline, and then the World Trade Center fell. The tragedy still resonates all over the world, and every day for Pat and Steve, who don’t see the towers out their window anymore.
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What they saw from their window |
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What they see from their window |
Several months after that terrible fall, Pat ended her sojourn in the mainstream press. She’s gone back to freelancing, finding it a fine way to explore the city and even a reason to take the mysterious G train. (Once anyway.) And hunt for the perfect papusa.
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