Journalist and author Anna Quindlen will join an elite group of writers April 29 when she receives the Denver Press Club’s annual Damon Runyon Award. Among them: Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Molly Ivins, Maureen Dowd and Tim Russert.
The Press Club cites Quindlen as someone who has “made an extraordinary contribution to the field of journalism.”
Quindlen said she appreciated the honor and the company of winners it puts her in. “It’s a hefty list no matter how you look at it,” she said.
Quindlen — known for her stints as a columnist at The New York Times and Newsweek, as well as her novels, lectures and children’s book — will arrive a day early to sign books at the Tattered Cover in LoDo.
We caught up with her by phone for a few questions.
Q: What would you hope readers take from your journalism and your novels?
A: I think the most valuable thing that writing does for people is to show them that they’re not alone. That’s why a certain kind of little kid can always be found curled up in a chair with a book. That’s why women have book clubs and talk about the novel afterwards, when often they’re not talking about the novel, really, they’re talking about themselves, and their lives and how they feel and what they value.
I think the most important part of reading is that connectedness, and I think it’s more important now than ever before because we live such isolated lives in so many ways.
Q: Much of your op-ed writing speaks to hope and the future.
A: I don’t think there is a lot of point of writing an op-ed unless it has a strong forward thrust. Your colleagues on the news desk are going to take care of what happened today; they’re probably even going to cover a lot of what is happening in the next weeks or months. A lot of (the columnist’s) work has to be about looking at the big picture and deciding where we are going.
I feel as though, over and over again, I was thinking, what are we doing, what ought we to be doing, what will be the net effect? I was especially interested in doing that for people who aren’t normally covered in the pages of the newspaper — the poor, the homeless, single mothers. That’s where I took the direction of H. L. Menken, “To afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.”
Q: Your latest novel, “Every Last One,” involves a parent’s worst nightmare — not only surviving your children but also living on after your family has been murdered. What was your starting point?
A: The novels always begin thematically, and the theme can take many incarnations. “Black and Blue” came with the theme of female identity; that doesn’t necessarily have to be played out in a scenario in which someone is being abused by her husband, but in this case it was. “Every Last One” undoubtedly came from thinking about safety and security and control, and American illusions about control.
In retrospect I realize that it had been germinating with me since September 2001. The randomness of the deaths on that day made me meditate constantly about how random violence and evil can be in our lives. And yet, we live as though if we do certain things, if we behave in certain ways, if we take certain precautions, everything will be all right.
With our kids, particularly, we’ve managed to lull ourselves into the sense that if we do certain things with them and for them, all will be well. It ignores the fact that life intrudes on our carefully managed plans.
Q: What do you anticipate speaking on at the dinner?A:I find it dispiriting how many of my colleagues in the newspaper business seem to have thrown up their hands about the changes in the business. Don’t get me wrong, I think the changes have come very quickly and that some of them require really inventive solutions that we haven’t come up with yet.
But if there’s any group of people who ought to be able to roll with the punches, it ought to be newspaper reporters. We’re a group of people who reinvent the world. It used to be every 24 hours; now with the 24-hour news cycle and the websites, it tends to be about every two or three hours.
I just hate to see us saying, “It’s over, it’s done, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Q: Do you have any concrete suggestions?
A: I think we have to embrace the change. We wasted a lot of years saying, first, “This Internet thing is never really going to catch on.” And then we wasted a lot of years saying, “Well, it’s catching on, but we’re better,” and I agree with a lot of that, but it’s really caught on.
I think that we have to decide how we can be part of the solution. As a veteran of The New York Times, I know the (paper) was not quick to embrace online journalism, but when it did, boy did it. So now it not only has the best newspaper in the country, it has the best newspaper website in the country. I think that’s because, at a certain point, they realized that this was indelibly the future.
Meet the author
Anna Quindlen will appear at the Tattered Cover, 1628 16th St., on April 28 at 7:30 p.m. She is the honored guest at the Damon Runyon Award Banquet on April 29 at the Denver Marriott City Center, 17th and California streets. Tickets for a VIP reception at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place, are $25; admission to the dinner is $100. Tickets, available at , must be purchased by Monday.
