The red writing room

A tribute to Pat Westfall, a writer and teacher who inspired me to pursue the creative life

I knew from the time I was a child that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. The knowledge sharpened through high school, where English was my favorite subject and I won awards for essays. Writing was the thing I was born knowing how to do—though I had plenty to learn about structure and craft.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, in a small Ohio town without much exposure to the world of Career Possibilities, I assumed journalism was the only way to write words and get paid for them. So I went to journalism school.

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In 1992, freshman year in j-school focused on teaching us how to work at a newspaper. We learned picas and column inches, the inverted pyramid, how to write obituaries—which, our news-writing professor told us, would likely be our first jobs out of school. I’m grateful for those skills. But by my second year I was restless with the just-the-facts cadence and scoop-chasing pace, and I started thinking seriously about switching majors to English. That career path might mean teaching someday, but at least it would let me be creative.

Then I met Pat Westfall, who opened my eyes to other possibilities.

Meeting a “real writer”

Professor Patricia Westfall taught magazine editing and production. She was a little kooky, with a strong personality and a weird, dry, sometimes biting sense of humor, and I adored everything about her. In her classes I didn’t just learn how to write and edit for magazines—I learned how to think about magazines: the target audience, the positioning, the visual identity, the editorial point of view. Looking back, it was an MBA crash course in magazine publishing for a bunch of sophomore college students. I had no idea at the time how meaningful that was.

Professor Westfall also wrote books. Plural. She had written the textbook we used in her classes, Beyond Intuition: A Guide to Writing and Editing Magazine Non-Fiction. She had recently published a memoir called Real Farm: Encounters with Perception, about the ten years she spent on an Iowa farm. She also wrote murder mysteries. She was the first person I had ever met in real life who wrote books, let alone multiple kinds of books, moving freely between them. I was in awe.

One afternoon, our class went to her house for a workshop. She took us upstairs to show us her writing room, which was painted a vibrant red-orange.

“Red stimulates creativity,” she told us as we stood gaping at the audaciousness of the room color.

I’ve dreamed about a red writing room ever since. More than the paint color, though, what I took from that afternoon was the realization that being a writer wasn’t a side hobby or a someday-dream—it was a room you walked into every morning. A door at the top of the stairs. A color you’d chosen on purpose.

Opening my eyes to new paths

Somewhere in my second year I must have confessed to Pat that I was struggling with journalism and wasn’t sure I belonged. She offered to do a one-on-one tutorial with me on literary journalism. Over a quarter, we read long-form pieces by Didion, McPhee, Tom Wolfe, and Gay Talese. I learned how storytelling, perspective, sensory detail, and stylistic choice could interplay with reporting. It wasn’t journalism the way I’d been taught it. It was journalism that did what fiction did.

"I truly believe that non-fiction is the new American literature,” she told a student reporter in a newspaper article when her memoir Real Farm came out. “You have to get beyond mere journalism, mere reporting, in order to describe the essence of your subject matter."

This was one of her big themes: what is this really about? What’s at the heart of this story? What is reality, versus what is our perception of reality? For kids who were all trying to learn how to tell “the truth” in black and white, these were provocative and eye-opening questions that shifted how I approached my craft forever.

The widening of my world

I was a shy kid going into college—a small-town, introverted, self-conscious, neurodivergent kid with good grades, a gift for writing, and no confidence. I had a hard time believing I had anything interesting to contribute to a relationship with the accomplished professors I was suddenly surrounded by. Pat intimidated me especially: her sarcasm, her wisdom, and the easy confidence she had about her own creative life. I wanted to be her at the same time I was always trying to take up less space around her and people like her.

After I graduated, I left Ohio, worked in magazines for several years, then switched to digital marketing and tech. I used to think about Pat a lot, but I didn’t stay in touch. I always assumed I was just another awkward kid who passed through and blurred into her memories.

About a year before she died, I was back in my college town for a journalism alumni event. The j-school’s director, another of my beloved professors, encouraged me to pay Pat a visit. She was ill and struggling to get around, and I couldn’t imagine she’d care about seeing me. I worried the visit would be awkward.

To my extreme surprise, she not only remembered me, but twenty-plus years later she remembered our tutorial on literary journalism. Then she pulled out portfolios of paintings she’d done since retiring, mostly from her travels. She had thrown herself into art the way she had thrown herself into writing, magazine publishing, and farming. It was the same lesson she had always been teaching, just in a different medium. Create the room you want, choose the color, and walk in.

I slipped right back into the scared, self-conscious twenty-year-old I’d been in her classroom. I hope I told her how much she meant to me. I’m not sure I did.

I think about her a lot now—because I’d love to be able to drop by her house in the beautiful Ohio countryside some Sunday and tell her all about what I’m doing with my writing life now. I bet she’d not only be thrilled, but that she’d have plenty of ideas for things I could do to make the experience even more fun and enriching.