Meet Me at the Press Club

Let’s talk about words and grit and stories that live on. Or, why I’m launching BOUNDLESS at a press club, not a bookstore

How I Say Goodbye to All That: An audio excerpt from Boundless

In BOUNDLESS, my memoir that asks, “What if the path to nowhere goes everywhere?” I finally say goodbye to myself as a journalist.

It was a hard goodbye. I was forced to reckon with leaving a profession I loved with all my heart. It has served me well on my way to writing books.

So it is fitting to hold the book launch party for BOUNDLESS at the Albuquerque Press Club, a speakeasy for journalists that’s a rustic stone and log cabin. It’s our gathering spot for words and grit and stories that live on.

The book launch party for BOUNDLESS is 7-9 p.m. Thursday, April 17, and is open to the public.

Why a press club?

Why a press club and not a bookstore, where I’ve launched all my other books? Here’s the big why. Or, rather, a list of whys.

• Because I came from this. As a child, I wanted to write novels about haunted houses. As a teenager, I wanted to write stories about exciting college basketball teams, like my hometown Kentucky Wildcats. As an aspiring college student, I decided to be practical.

I noticed there was a word factory down the street from the university—a massive printing press that rolled all through the night behind the four-story glass windows and miraculously got its tight little bundle of a product on doorsteps all across the commonwealth of Kentucky by morning.

That seemed like a powerful way to work with words. Also, a good way to get paid while I figured out how to be a novelist. I had found some people who needed my words.

I decided to double-major in English and journalism. Print journalism is my foundational career, and it carried me far. Until BOUNDLESS.

• Because journalism taught me how to write a novel—or a memoir that reads like a novel. Instead of staying alone in my room and thinking thoughts about imaginary characters, as shy literary writers are wont to do, I mixed it up with real life.

I got out there, interviewed people, listened to how they talked and heard what they were concerned about. I sat through government meetings and court hearings where I might be the only one watching as someone did something bad (or sometimes good!) for the public. I learned to look for the lede (lead paragraph), the one that told you what changed today and why it mattered.

• Because we’re the true believers. Getting at the truth is laborious and worth it. Representing the public interest—our shared lives, together—and not someone’s personal/political/corporate interest is extraordinary and noble work.

And integrity journalists will keep doing that no matter the low pay, long hours and slings and arrows from the people who want journalists to be the spear tips in their personal crusades to obfuscate the truth.

The truth sets you free, my friend. It always does. That’s why people are so afraid of it. That’s why journalists and authors seek it.

• Because we know how hard it is. The superpower of an independent journalist is that we know how to be poor and noble, because it means no one owns us.

• Because journalists are my second family. I found my tribe when I went to journalism school.

In my first family, my family of origin, storytelling was at the heart of things, my Irish storyteller father who narrated over the course of several months of family dinners the whole history of both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II in vivid detail. He’d quote Shakespeare on the spot. As a Bible teacher, he also knew the art of a parable, or teaching story.

When I found my tribe of journalists, I found other people who always had a story to tell.

• Because the Albuquerque Press Club was where the last dwindling twilight moment of my print journalism career set itself in my memory. For 16 years, I had been editor of Sage magazine in the Albuquerque Journal. For the February 2015 issue, the theme was weddings, an issue I always dreaded because it forced us to pay homage to the wedding industrial complex. But because I was so allergic to this expensive fairytale-making, I always dug down deeper—because at least if we could make it original or edgy, that would be something.

Six months before this, Sage magazine had won a National Press Women award for best magazine. Now I had just been told this would be the last issue. I still had a job editing other publications—just not the one I loved doing.

For the last photo shoot, we chose the Albuquerque Press Club, a three-story rustic log and stone house that sits atop a hill in east downtown. Built in 1903, the house is Norwegian Vernacular architecture and was originally built by architect Charles Frederick Whittlesey, who was building the Alvarado Hotel, a Harvey House hotel that now is the Alvarado Transportation Center. One of the most remarkable features of the Albuquerque Press club is the fireplace in the front room, made of rough-hewn black lava rock from the volcanoes west of the city.

Because of its perch in Huning Highlands, the Albuquerque Press Club offers views of the sunset as watermelon light splashes over the Sandias to the east, then the golden glow of the sun as it drops on the western horizon between the volcanoes.

A final touch for the last photo shoot would be vintage cars. On Facebook, we discovered a club of vintage car enthusiasts. Were they game? Yes, what would you like—a racing green Jaguar with gleaming chrome or Austin Healey with whitewall tires? We chose the Jaguar.

• Because that’s where the words come alive. They live here because when journalists and authors get together, we revive the stories. And stories, we’ve got stories!

‘We’re still here’

I’d like to tell you it was a brilliant marketing move to choose the Albuquerque Press Club, but it’s really because someone died. It has become our custom, as beloved friends and journalists die, to gather there for storytelling memorial events. The someone who died, in November 2024, was Ollie Reed, whose 40+ year career included the Albuquerque Tribune and the Albuquerque Journal. Colleagues described him as the cowboy poet of New Mexico and “our touchstone.”

In 2023, the Albuquerque Museum showcased an exhibit about local journalism, and there, it quoted OllieReed, as we called him, about this noble profession. In his tribute to OllieReed in the Albuquerque Journal, esteemed New Mexico journalist Phill Casaus drew on that quote to close out his commemoration.

“The people who work for newspapers are as dedicated and hard working as they ever have been. There are fewer of us now,” OllieReed wrote. “But we’re still here because there is only one truth, and it’s our job to report it, to provide news for the people.”

The stories don’t die. One brittle-cold fall night, we crowded the rooms at the Albuquerque Press Club, spilling out into the biting air, and remembered.

If you’re in Albuquerque or Santa Fe, come join us to launch BOUNDLESS!

7-9 p.m. Mountain time

Thursday, April 17

featuring Carolyn Dawn Flynn, author of BOUNDLESS

+

special guests

Dr. Wendy Johnson, M.D., author of KINSHIP MEDICINE

Deborah Begel, host of Classical Explorations on KSFR

ALBUQUERQUE PRESS CLUB + 201 Highland Park Cir SE, Albuquerque, NM 87102

Appetizers from M’tucci’s + cupcakes from Small Cakes

No-host bar

If you’re in Denver, keep an eye out. We’re cooking up at an event at the Denver Press Club.

JUST FOR FUN - Here’s a little post from the Weekly Alibi about “Drinking with Ghosts” at the Albuquerque Press Club

https://alibi.com/feature/drinking-with-ghosts/