Garry Reed
[Continued from page 1]
SUNNI: That's kind of surprising -- that you don't like your moniker. Given your differing approach from the bulk of libertarian writers, and your apparent willingness to take on just about any subject, it seems to fit you very well. Would you seriously consider changing it after four years?
GARRY: Maybe I'm just getting tired of it. I'd change it or dump it outright if my whole venue changed, like if I started writing for other sites or media exclusively and switched my online presence to a blog, let's say. But I can't see changing it just for the sake of changing it. I'm way too lazy for that.
SUNNI: One of the things I like best about your writing is that even though you're addressing important issues, you consistently have a light tone. It's not that you're making fun of something, necessarily, but [pauses] you have this air of bemusement that doesn't detract from your serious points. How did that come about? Is it difficult to maintain that style sometimes?
GARRY: My style came about precisely because of your earlier comment -- "It isn't as if the freedom movement is short on writers." There are a great many very good, very knowledgeable, very serious libertarian writers. I'm glad they're on our side and I admire them. But I also saw that as a problem. The movement seemed to be almost exclusively academics and economists writing to other academics and economists. Most of us are just ordinary but thoughtful people who have enough gray matter to understand issues of philosophy and ideology and politics and moral principles without specialized training. I knew that's who my audience would be for my early NewsGuy articles. Since I'm one of those people too, I developed what one observer called a "man-on-the-street" style, which to me is just writing peer-to-peer. I also saw another problem with libertarian writers. Everyone was so ponderously serious! I'm not a serious person at heart, and I just had no fun trying to write that way. I grew up on Mad magazine and newspaper political cartoons and all sorts of humor. My father had been a working professional comic strip cartoonist in his younger years until the Great Depression destroyed his dreams along with everyone else's from that era. But he constantly saw the humorous in everyday events, and I just naturally picked that up from him. So, while the content of my message is serious, the delivery system is sassy, saucy, satirical, whimsical, whatever. The primary audience for my articles is me. If I don't enjoy reading them, I don't want to write them. It is difficult to maintain that style sometimes, because some subjects just can't be made light of. I frequently start and then abandon article ideas because of that.
SUNNI: I'm assuming you have a day job that pays your bills ... is that a writing job, too?
GARRY: I'm a technical writer, which means I write operation and maintenance manuals and other similar type engineering documentation. I've written step-by-step instructions on how to operate the machinery that pumps caulking compound out of a 55-gallon drum and stuffs it into the tubes you buy in your hardware store. I've written procedures on how to remove a failed hydraulic pump from your airplane and install a new one. I've written how to use a software program to identify and track a company's products. Really exciting stuff like that.
SUNNI: And here I thought it was mandated somewhere that all those how-to manuals had to be written in Chinese, then translated to Russian before making it into English ... or maybe that's just the consumer instruction rules. [laughs]
GARRY: Yeah, and here I write manuals for a living but I won't read one except as a last resort. [laughs] Maybe it's the old shoemaker's kids never having any shoes syndrome.
SUNNI: Sounds like it. How do you create the time every month to write two columns? Oh, wait -- you don't have kids in the house, right? That explains a lot right there! [laughs]
GARRY: Right, no kids. Mary has four from her first marriage and I have three, and we definitely decided against doing the "Yours Mine and Ours" thing. My job gets me all day and of course I'd rather spend more time with Mary than my computer in the evenings, although she would definitely overturn that opinion on review [a loud "Ha!" is heard in the background]. But that's why -- unless someone wants to pay me full time, hint, hint -- I write only two columns per month. For the past 30 years I've worked my technical writing jobs on a contract basis, which is sort of like freelancing except that I depend on companies called contract engineering firms to match up my skills with a client company and then I go to work for the client. Since I'm often brought in as a hired gun to get the job done quickly and then get out it means I can be working a lot of overtime hours for months on end. Then, at other times, I may be between jobs -- never "unemployed" -- for weeks or months. So my Loose Cannon writing sometimes comes in spurts. I might bang out four or five articles, one after the other, and then go weeks without writing. But somehow I always seem to make my self-imposed deadlines.
