My Villain Origin Story

A long, long time ago, a junior in college started a blog…

I don’t think I have particularly villainous energy — mostly because yesterday someone told me I have “chicken-dance-at-a-wedding energy” — but it’s a sexier subject line than Why I’m Starting A Newsletter Called The Wilder Things.

So think of this email as JOKER (2019). But instead of Joaquin Phoenix playing a comedian who’s bummed that nobody laughed at his jokes and therefore descends into a life of crime while painting his face like a clown, it’s me trying to figure out how to “be” a “writer” when I was a junior in college.

The year was 2009, and I started a blog called The Wilder Things (now you know why that’s my handle on all social media platforms). I loved the book Where The Wild Things Are, so — seeing as it goes nicely with my last name — I chose this title. Pretty simple!

I hope other people who were bookworms in the ‘90s are looking at that gold Caldecott Medal sticker and feeling some type of way about it.

Technically, my desire to “be” a “writer” starts a lot earlier. My mother Deborah Weisgall is an author (read her books!!!), a journalist, and the best writer I know. I grew up playing underneath her desk while she was on deadline. She took me on work trips with her, like when she reported a story about what mushers feed their dog-sled teams in Wyoming (the things I write about are starting to make more sense already, aren’t they?). I saw what was possible.

So I “founded” a newspaper in second grade, wrote an article called something like “The Beanie Baby Craze Is Sweeping Smith Elementary School,” and then never put out another issue. In third grade I wrote a story about a team of scuba-diving explorers hunting for treasure. I didn’t want to finish it, but my teacher made me, so in a few sentences I had the divers run out of oxygen and decide to fart themselves to the surface.

Ms. [redacted]’s reception of the final draft made me think she did not have a sense of humor.

I won’t take you through any more of my formative years except to shout out my fourth-grade teacher Ms. Baxter, who changed my life. She was a tough, no-nonsense woman, and when she told me I was a good writer, it unlocked something. That was when I started believing — and somehow have continued to for 25 years — that this is what I could do.

So fast forward to college. It’s the late aughts, and the internet is pretty much still the wild west. A guy in the class above me started a blog, and all of a sudden, people across the country were reading it. I thought, “I could do that.” So, I did. I majored in history, minored in creative writing, and quickly realized that it was going to be very hard to make a living as a poet.

After I graduated, I kept my blog going while I freelanced sporadically, worked odd jobs, and tried to break into media. I was lucky to live at home with my parents at the time, which is a huge privilege (I’ve talked about that before here). I posted every day; I wanted The Wilder Things to be a living resume. I hoped someone in journalism would see how dedicated I was and hire me.

I wrote really insightful essays like, “Why Valentine’s Day Is Ridiculous,” and “5 Ways To Make Valentine’s Day Less Stupid,” and “Why Am I Sitting Front Row At NY Fashion Week?” (I can tell you that story another time if you want, let me know — thewilderthings@substack.com).

People started reading my blog, and soon, it became much more than a tool to get a job. It gave me a sense of purpose and somewhat assuaged the horrible, existential anxiety of my early twenties. Becoming friendly with my regular commenters made me feel less lonely as I tried figured out what to do with my life.

Eventually, my grand plan worked. I applied cold for a job at America’s Test Kitchen; the lovely woman who ran their websites read my blog and decided to hire me.

I was an “assistant web editor,” which meant that, among other things, I was put in charge of managing ATK’s YouTube channel. That is probably now the job of a VP-level executive, but it was 2012, we were still figuring out how the internet worked, and I was a 23-year-old Millennial who was supposed to be good at the world wide web.

I produced and starred in (not to brag) a video about how to make kale chips in the microwave, got a bunch of angry emails from customers whose microwaves caught on fire, and realized that home-cooking media might not be for me (I also got to do cool things like travel the country hunting down regional recipes, but it’s the kale chips that are my lasting legacy).

I am providing material ^ you can roast me with, so don’t say I never did anything for you.

I then talked my way into a job at Boston.com, a part of the Boston Globe. This is also when my original blog disappeared: One day in 2015, GoDaddy (lol) told me that I forgot to pay for my domain name, and the entire thing vanished off the internet. I was very sad and then felt very free. No one needs access to every sappy essay they wrote when they were 19.

At the time, Boston.com was trying to be New York Magazine, but for Boston (spoiler alert: it didn’t work). I was allowed to do everything there, such as reporting on climate change, writing personal essays (weren’t the 2010s wild?), and covering the arts. I learned the value of on-the-ground, local reporting.

You might be wondering how you know me from the sports world, if, so far, I haven’t mentioned sports at all.