Assistant Director of Development Rhonda K. Miller: “writing…can take a person anywhere”

What writing project(s) are you working on right now?

I’ve been writing faculty profiles for Bucknell’s Web site. I interview new or newly promoted faculty, then write their story on a freelance basis. Sometimes I interview long-term faculty who haven’t had a profile published. These are 300-400 word vignettes that often present challenge since the faculty are extremely accomplished. It forces brevity. For my full-time job, I write campaign proposals, pledge forms, endowment agreements, donor letters and other more technical pieces related to fundraising at Bucknell. Personally, I am reworking a story I filed about three years ago in Robert Rosenberg’s advanced fiction course. I’m rethinking the entire approach, while trying not to overthink it. I hope to publish a version of it someday.

What do you love about it?

I’ve been writing nonfiction professionally for 26 years, and my favorite part is learning about topics that I wouldn’t have picked on my own. One of the first stories I published was about a grocery story that doubled as an opossum museum in an obscure part of Texas. I’ve done news stories on pretty much everything – interviewing a local farmer who grew a 75-pound zucchini to recounting the last days in a 22-year-old’s life prior to his brutal murder. When I worked for the New York Times Magazine Group, I traveled around the country reviewing fancy tennis resorts, and I wrote about the fitness routines of players such as Steffi Graf. I’ve written about tennis equipment, small town government, industrial chemical fires and the benefits of nap rooms for employees. I’ve worked at local newspapers and national magazines – what I love about writing is it can take a person anywhere. Think: Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

What about writing drives you nuts?

I usually dread starting, but it’s always worth it.

How would you describe your writing process?

When I worked in the news business, there wasn’t time to ruminate over stories. You went out, got the story, came back, wrote and filed by deadline. I was only concerned about meeting deadline with an accurate account of what I was reporting. I realized years later that I might have missed some flavor – describing local personalities or including more of my own voice instead of just the cold, hard facts. By my own voice, I’m not advocating a writer’s opinion in a news story but rather taking more time with turn of phrase. Now I mentally process stories longer than I used to, meaning I think about them for days, sometimes a week, depending on my deadline. I find that my writing flows better. Then I rewrite.

What kind of feedback on your writing do you find most helpful?

I want to know if the story makes sense to the reader. I want to know if it has accomplished the assigned mission. Other sets of eyes are always good.

What would you like students to know about writing?

Take time to listen for stories – stories are everywhere! Be willing to try all forms of writing: business, creative, journalism, sports. Read. Two of my undergraduate faculty gave me this advice: 1. Take risks; 2. Have a notebook and pen strapped to your person at all times.

Rhonda K . Miller is an Assistant Director of Development in Development & Alumni Relations. She’s written for Tennis Magazine, Human Resource Executive Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Norwalk Hour, Fairfield Citizen-News, the Knox Alumnus and Bucknell Magazine, among others.

Jenni Whalen ’12 on how writing allows her to hear herself. And to be heard.

Jenni Whalen

Psychology Major, Creative Writing & Italian Studies minors

Hometown: Seattle, WA

When talking about her writing, Sharon O’Brien (an author who works at Dickinson) says, “Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning:  I wanted to know what I was going to say.”

I believe that this is why I write. I write because when I am putting words on a page, I suddenly realize what I could not say out loud, what I didn’t even know was in my head to begin with.

I am a senior Psychology major with Creative Writing and Italian Studies minors. When I applied to college at the age of 18, I thought that I might want to do something related to journalism or communications. I applied mostly to universities with journalism programs, but when I visited Bucknell, I fell in love and decided that I could overlook the fact that there was no journalism program. My poor parents were a bit worried by my choice to attend Bucknell (about a 12 hour travel day from Seattle), but to their credit, they remained supportive every step of the way.

As I began to take classes at Bucknell, I gradually let my dreams of journalism fade into the background as I fell in love with other subjects. At the time, I figured I’d get my master’s in Clinical Psychology. During my junior year, however, I rediscovered my love of writing for a couple of reasons. First, I took UNIV 239, the class that is required in order to be hired as a peer writing consultant in Bucknell’s Writing Center. As I spent three hours each week learning about the writing process (and writing multiple papers about the Amish community), I began to remember why I loved writing so much. That same semester, I enrolled in a Creative Writing: Non-Fiction class with Professor Camuto. He took a liking to me and to my writing, and began to coach me about how to shape my prose, and I became hooked on the idea of writing as an art form. Those two courses were my favorite – they didn’t even feel like classes! – so I realized that I might have caught onto something.

During the spring of my junior year, I studied in Florence, Italy. While there, I was a study abroad blogger for Bucknell’s website (yes, that was my face on the home page…) and I also worked for a student travel website and wrote for a student newspaper in Florence. I think this was the point where I suddenly realized that my love 

of writing and journalism wasn’t just a high school dream – it was something that I needed to pursue. When I returned to Bucknell for my senior year, I continued working for a few online publications, continued working in the Writing Center on campus and began to write for the Bucknellian again.

This year, as a senior, I’ve struggled with what to choose as a career path. Taking the steps that will allow you to pursue your dream is terrifying, because if it doesn’t work out for some reason, then you are losing the thing you are most passionate about. Because of this, I vacillated back and forth about career options. I knew that I could get a job in consulting, or teaching English in Italy, or doing some sort of writing work for a big company. I also knew that I could try to dig my elbows in and break into the very difficult and competitive magazine industry. As a third option, I applied to a couple of schools to get my master’s in journalism. And then I sat around feeling extremely confused.

Thankfully, Bucknell is full of very wise people, and I ended up with some wonderful job and graduate school options in front of me by the end of last month. Last week, I decided to accept a position at Boston University to get my master’s in Journalism with a focus on either magazine or investigative journalism. I will be working with Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and spending the next year of my life in Boston. I will actually be doing the thing I’ve always dreamed of doing, and that feels pretty incredible!

So, in answer to the questions that were posed to me when writing this blog, writing is important to my life and studies because I could not live and study without it. Writing helps me sort through my personal life, and it calms me down when I’m stressed out. Writing gives me a way to express my knowledge in class. It allows me to share information with thousands of college women across the nation through the website that I intern and write for (HerCampus.com). Writing is something that I get to discuss in the Writing Center and experiment with in my poetry class. Writing is not just important in my life; writing is my life. The words don’t have to be right, or complicated, or pretty, but they allow me to express myself in a way that I can’t vocalize, and they allow me to be heard in a way that I’d never imagine was possible.