While still a graduate student I wrote a paper that received a minor academic award. It was then picked up by one of the more prestigious academic journals for publication, not a common accomplishment in those days for a lowly graduate student.

The article’s appeal seemed to lie in a combination of casting an otherwise mundane story of a state government administrative ruling as a counter-intuitive departure from traditional government policies and the dominant influence of private sector interests, and launching the story with a tale of farmworker protest replete with defiant chants and a bonfire destroying their employers’ property, a decidedly non-academic entrée into a scholarly inquiry. But there I was, a published and award-winning graduate student a little more than a year into my studies. I had succeeded in reinventing myself again through writing, this time as a novice scholar.

I soon came to realize that writing was not only a discipline but more a way of thinking, as George Orwell had argued in his famous 1946 article, “Politics and the English Language.” It forced me to organize thoughts and ruthlessly discard what seemed like strokes of genius but, in fact, did little to move a story along toward its denouement. Even scholarship, or perhaps more accurately especially scholarship, was about telling stories in clear if at times not entirely spell-binding prose.

Writing framed how I looked at the world, not unlike my hobby of photography. As a photographer, every scene I came upon was a photo opportunity. I looked at the world as if composing a photograph, framing it, checking how the light played across it, considering how might I draw the observer’s eye into the heart of that upon which I gazed. When I was writing, I filtered what I was observing, hearing and thinking and parsed it for its contribution to a compelling story. The more I wrote, the more I became a writer in ways difficult to understand for people not enthralled by the written word. One becomes one’s discipline, the surrounding world no more than a reflection, reminiscent of the old saying, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.