After several months of faltering emails and mistimed phone calls, Mary Schinhofen sent me a single sentence in November 2024:
“The biggest commitment I can make is that I will try!”
That was the last I heard until I badgered her again nine months later, this past August. This time, she replied within five minutes to suggest a pivot from the essay we’d workshopped on her Now or Never Writers group for older folks to “a few reflective comments” after a recent trip to the beach. I delicately tried to steer us back toward the original concept, but I was starting to suspect this essay wouldn’t make it.
About a month later, 1,251 words landed in my inbox, chronicling a journey of grief and hope since her husband — her “lover, friend and partner for nearly 67 years” — died during the pandemic. I can neither confirm nor deny whether it left this stiff-lipped Brit teary.
The strength of Mary’s story, published last month, lies largely in its emphasis on the highs and lows that in one way or another mark out every human life. And yet the half-dozen or more readers who wrote in to share how it touched them confirm the power of ordinary personal experiences when told with vulnerability and clarity.
We seek out and publish first-person essays for this reason. Because, amid the facts that drive hard news, we know that emotive, firsthand narratives can cut through differently. The best essays channel those deeply personal experiences into a broader cause or concern that’s able to move, or at least provoke, readers throughout our region. Like how Jamie Silvonek recounted her teenage years in a maximum security prison to argue for reforms to juvenile incarceration.
Not everyone with an idea to share wants to wear their heart on their sleeve. That’s understandable. We’ve recently launched our guest commentaries page for shorter, ideas-fronted pieces that can stimulate civic dialogue outside the bounds of first-person storytelling.
When essayists are generous with their personal experiences, we always find it rewarding — and we often hear it’s helpful for them, too. The necessary self-reflection, and the process of ordering fragments of life into a concise narrative can be clarifying and empowering, writers have told us.
They also help us highlight voices that commonly go underrepresented in the media.
Sometimes that means older people, like Mary, or people with neurodivergence, like Shannon Parris and Eli Kurs-Laski. It can also mean formerly incarcerated people like Terri Minor-Spencer, or someone, like Aim Comperatore, who felt out of place in the dominant binary gender paradigm before pronoun variations became commonplace.
Each of these essayists – most of whom aren’t writers by trade – have enriched and inspired our readers, building bridges across our city, where 440-odd spans don’t always feel like enough.
I’m glad that Mary opted for now, rather than never. Might you do the same? Click here to send us a short summary of your essay idea.
Jamie Wiggan is Pittsburgh Public Source’s deputy editor and can be reached at jamie @publicsource.org.
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