Len and The Zipper Club featured in The Courier-Journal!
As the thin veil of panic and distress began to lift around my life when The Zipper Club campaign ended in success, I got an interesting phone call. In my final weeks worth of marathon panic to find funding, I took to posting a series of fliers around town to help get the word out in whatever manner I could. It didn’t appear that the fliers had done much to drum up business, but we made it through the campaign successfully anyhow. About a week after the campaign’s end I got an interesting voice mail from a young lady working for Louisville’s local paper, The Courier Journal. She introduced herself as Kirsten Clark, and said she had just gotten the job with the CJ and saw my flyer in a local book store, pitched the idea of covering it to her editor and wondered if I would be cool with talking to her about the project for the paper.Of course, I promptly said “no thank you” to her offer of free advertising, because being broke and “keeping it real” are half the point of being an artist, no matter what your medium. Unfortunately my friendly decline didn’t wash with the plucky young reporter, as she managed to track me down on 5 separate occasions and coerce information from me to get her precious story which is printed in today’s issue of the CJ as well as available to read online.In the span of our conversations, she asked me about everything from my childhood to my career as a writer to my continuing life living with my heart defect and I got to know a little about her and how she came to be working for the paper in Louisville. When she mentioned some of her rejected story pitches including one about midwifery being legalized in Indiana after being outlawed for decades for whatever strange reason they might have had, I knew she was just weird enough that we’d get along just fine.
In all seriousness, it was an honor to talk with Kirsten on every occasion and she took every bit of information that I bombarded her with in professional stride. She’s new in her field, but I think she’ll go far and from what I understand, this is her first big pitched project for the paper to see print. I couldn’t be happier with the justice she’s done with telling my story and the story of what Brenda and I are doing with The Zipper Club as well as what I hope to accomplish within this blog in the span of 800 meager words and I humbly beseech her bosses to give her whatever she wants in the future.
08/06/2016 EDIT: The Courier Journal has recently sent the article in question to their archives. It can now be accessed through Newspaper.com at this link. We've also taken the liberty of scanning and saving the article here in it's entirety so that readers don't need to pay to read it.
