Pioneer

Issue date: 1/28/10 Section: Campus

Media Credit: Felecia Clow Pierce's newspaper adviser, Michael Parks, shares his journey to journalism. As a child, Parks wanted to travel the world and become a famous writer.

What courses do you teach at Pierce?

I teach a documentary class where students will get different perspectives of the world and be introduced to things they might have never come across.
I also teach news writing. Students learn how to discipline their writing in this class, and I think there are a lot of writers out there who need more discipline and need to understand how the market reads. And I advise the glorious, award-winning Pioneer staff.


What do you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be the same thing I wanted to be when I was 9 years old. Actually, when I was 9, I said I wanted to be a novelist and own a pet store. The pet store I can do without now, but I'd still like to take a shot at the novelist thing.


If you wanted to be a novelist, what steered you toward news writing?

I think my fifth grade teacher got me into writing inadvertently. I was always getting into trouble; as punishment, I had to repeatedly write a sentence 100 times, then 200 times, then 300. Once I started getting up to 2,000, I decided to ask her if I could write a story instead. To my surprise, she was excited about the idea.
Then toward the end of high school, my mom was trying to get me to think about college, and I said, "No, I'm going to travel the world and become a famous writer."
She never said, "No, you won't," but she'd always say, "Well, it may not happen as quickly as you think, so why don't you get a fall-back?"
She was the one who first suggested journalism, and I said, "No, I'm going to be a novelist or nothing."
I avoided journalism up until my senior year in college at Seattle Pacific, and then I had the usual senior panic of "Oh, my gosh, I'm almost out of here and I've got nothing." So I gave in and took a journalism class.

What did you do before you started teaching at Pierce?

Before Pierce, I taught for about a year and a half at Everett Community College. Before that, I did some freelance public relations and feature writing. I wrote for Business Profile magazine.
The first newspaper I wrote for was The Chronicle in Centralia, as much as I hate to admit it. They have the reputation of being the worst daily in the state, although it certainly improved when I arrived, and probably even more when I left. Then I was an editor for the Lake City Journal.


What were the worst stories you had to write?

My least favorite stories were actually interviewing beauty queens. The first time it was awesome - a girl named Leila Wagner, who actually went on to be a pretty big name in professional bowling, of all things.
She was interesting, and it was kind of fun to go interview this beauty queen. I had to go take her out to a nice lunch at a nice restaurant, and I was like, "Ah, I love this job."
But after about the third one, I was on my knees, begging the managing editor to never send me out on another beauty queen interview. It was like scraping your nails on a chalkboard after awhile.

If you had $1 million, what would you do or how would you spend it?

I'd charter my own jet, hire my own stewardesses and go to Ireland. Might call up Hugh Hefner, see if I could hang with him for awhile.
No, really, I would travel. If I had the ability to have the money to go first class in comfort, I would do a lot of traveling. To Ireland first and then to England, Scotland and possibly other European countries - Germany and such. Maybe not France; I'm not real keen on France.

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