The Importance of Mentors

Photo by Robin Templeton

by Barb Goffman

I'm so pleased to be joining the SleuthSayers blog. As I contemplated what to write in my first post here, I remembered another time when I was the new kid. It was the summer of 1993, and I was interning as a reporter at Newsday on Long Island. Newsday is a big newspaper now, but back then it was even bigger--its circulation placed it in the top ten of US daily newspapers. Getting that summer job was a huge deal, and I arrived on my first day excited and eager and more than a little nervous. And then I met my editor for the summer, Dennis Bell.

Dennis Bell

I've had my share of good and bad bosses over the years. Dennis was one of the best. He had a smile that even now, twenty plus years later, makes me break out into a smile of my own. Dennis believed in his reporters. He backed them up. He helped them improve. He came to a barbecue I threw and hung out with everyone, just one of the gang, kind and cool, a great mentor.

But Dennis was more than that. He was a guy who started out at Newsday as a janitor, and he worked his way up and became a reporter. He went on to win a Pulitzer Prize as part of a reporting team sent to cover famine in Ethiopia. And then he became an editor and tried to help young people succeed, just as he had. Dennis was a role model, someone I hoped to emulate in my career, and someone I hoped to keep in touch with forever.

Forever came to a screeching halt two years later when Dennis died. To this day, I'm still a bit heartbroken.

Yet Dennis lives on, not only in my memory, but surely in the memories of all the reporters who worked for him on the Suffolk County desk, as well as his family and friends. He lives on as reminder to work your hardest--you never know how far you can go--but to also have a little fun along the way. I hope to do that here at SleuthSayers: a good job talking about writing, and having a little fun while I'm at it.

My dog, Jingle. More on him later.

Which reminds me, I've told you about Dennis, but not much about me. After working as a reporter for a few years, I went to law school. And after working as an attorney for nearly a dozen years, I became a freelance fiction editor. In my spare time, I'm a voracious reader, and I've been writing crime short stories for more than a decade.

I've had the good fortune to win the Macavity and Silver Falchion awards for my short stories, and I've been named a finalist for other awards (eight times for the Agatha, and three times each for the Macavity and Anthony awards). Two years ago, Wildside Press published my first collection of short stories, Don't Get Mad, Get Even, which won the Silver Falchion for best collection of 2013. Being a short-story writer has been a ton of fun, and with hard work, tenacity, and a bit of luck, I've succeeded far beyond what I'd imagined the first day I put fingers to keyboard. I'd like to think that somewhere, Dennis Bell is grinning at me.

He may also be thinking of the advice he gave me before I left his employ: don't sweat the first six months of any job as a reporter. That's the time to get your feet wet and to get to know your beat. But after the end of your second six months, if you haven't gotten someone arrested, you're not doing your job right. So let's consider this my settling-in period here at SleuthSayers. I hope it turns out all right. Will anyone be arrested by this time next summer? Well, maybe in my short stories. Keep a look out for a character named Dennis. If you see him, you'll know he's one of the good guys.

Do you have a mentor who's made a big difference in your life? I'd love to hear about him or her.