Journalism as Therapy

Guardian reporter Jim Day interviewed me over the telephone this morning about Using Her Marbles, an interview that had extra depth to it because it was in a front-page interview by Jim for The Guardian in 2016 that Catherine “went public” with her cancer.

Jim started at the paper the same year we moved to Charlottetown, in 1993, and it’s been more than once over those years that his journalistic gaze has overlapped with our household’s interests: I have always found him to be a reporter unusually invested in his subjects, an asker of meaty questions, and a skilled writer. 

Jim and I spent almost an hour on the phone this morning, and beyond the journalistic purpose of our chat, I found the interview extremely therapeutic. “Who was Catherine?”, Jim asked me, for example; nobody had ever asked me that before, and the process of answering that question took me places I hadn’t yet been. 

Jim’s story will run in the paper in the coming days, I imagine.

Jim himself retires after 27 years of service to the paper and to the Island, at the end of this month; you wouldn’t be out of line if you sent him an email thanking him for being someone who has skillfully reflected the Island and its people and, on occasion, allowed us to look deeper inside ourselves.