Making a splash Notes on a nourishing ride BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

It was one of those winter-blues kind of days when my friend Jim said, "Thulani Davis is coming to speak at URI. Why don’t you call up the NewPaper and do a preview?" Ordinarily I can’t get myself to do things like that — use someone’s name to gain entrée — but I called up Lou (Papineau), told him my writing credentials, and he bought it! He even called me back to do an interview with Maya Angelou for the same issue and ran both pieces on "the splash," the front page of the second section, a very prominent spot and therefore coveted by all of us freelancers.

That was February of ’85, and I’ve been writing for managing editor Lou — and various news editors — ever since. Those first couple of years it seemed that my forte was female poets, feminist writers, and women-making-a-difference, such as Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan. I also wrote theater reviews occasionally, but it was books and authors that I thrived on.

Then, in January 1987, I was asked to write a piece for the news section of the paper, and that set me on a different path. Having worked as a community organizer for six years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, bringing people together to fight economic injustice or the threat of environmental hazards, I was attuned to those issues. So I wrote almost weekly news features for the next two years. In addition to stories on patronage appointments by then-Governor DiPrete or the leadership struggles in the General Assembly, I wrote about uninsured obstetric patients, homeless families, domestic violence and sexual assault, welfare families and their rights, HIV and AIDS survivors, abortion rights, a leaky landfill in Richmond, untreated sewage pouring into the Upper Bay, and rights-of-way along the ocean. I look at those topics now and ask myself, "Has there been any progress made in these areas, or not?" In some cases, yes; in some cases, no.

By January of ’89, the logo (and ownership) of the paper had changed. Now called the Phoenix’s NewPaper, it carried news stories on the front page, including one I jumped at writing: the spilling of hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into Narragansett Bay by the oil tanker World Prodigy. Why was I so eager to cover this environmental catastrophe? Because I wanted to try to answer the tough questions of whether the oil really evaporated as quickly as state officials claimed, how much damage to marine life could be expected, and whether the company that owned the ship would pay for the cleanup. Of course, doing the research for those questions in just two days, without the benefit of long-term studies on this particular spill, I couldn’t come up with definitive answers, but I presented some hardcore stats from some well-respected scientists and I believe I gave readers challenging information to digest.

I continued to write news stories and to do theater, gallery, dance, and book reviews over the next three years, though I had to eventually give up the news assignments since I was now holding down a full-time job as director of the Rhode Island Women’s Health Collective. My husband Bill started doing some theater reviews in late ’89 and gradually picked up more of that turf, though I held onto occasional theater and dance reviews even after I took a job as development director at East Bay Community Action.

Also in the early ’90s, I began to do more travel-type stuff for Phoenix supplements, sometimes short and sometimes longer pieces about hiking, biking, swimming, surfing, and just generally poking around in little-known corners of Rhode Island and other parts of New England. I loved extolling the benefits of close contact with the natural world in this populous and very urban state or encouraging people to discover an out-of-the-way museum or gallery.

Why does this sound like This Is Your Life? Because I want to show how the Phoenix has stayed in my life for almost two decades and to point out that my Phoenix life does not consist only, or primarily, of going out to eat! Yes, I started writing twice-monthly restaurant reviews in 1989. Sometime in ’91, Bill began to write an occasional one, and now he and I alternate weekly. We’ve probably visited more than 300 restaurants around the state of Rhode Island, from small, roadside breakfast eateries to sprawling, elegant dinner spots. And these restaurant reviews must be one of the most well-read sections of the paper, since they seem to be the writing that we’re known for.

Granted, it’s fun to talk food and hot new places with people, but I can only hope that they also read the theater, dance, book, gallery, and film pieces that we write for the Phoenix. Bill and I have always felt that we were supporting the arts as much as critiquing them.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I tell people that I was one of the first female writers to write for the NewPaper/Providence Phoenix, and that I made a point of writing about "women’s issues." And that the reason I held onto my given name in print, in contrast to the nickname many friends use (and which Bill uses in the restaurant reviews), is that I didn’t want there to be any confusion about my gender.

As for coming full circle to writing about the arts and about food, I think it’s a case of "following your bliss." In the years that I’ve written for the NewPaper/Providence Phoenix, I’ve also published pieces in Ms., Rhode Island Monthly, Boston Woman, Boston Magazine and, more recently, the Boston Globe, New England Travel & Life, the Boston Phoenix, Yankee Magazine, and Saveur. I’ve taught creative non-fiction classes at Brown Learning Community for the past five years and continue to do some grant-writing for the anti-poverty agency in the East Bay. I currently freelance full-time, and I’m working on two books of non-fiction.

So my writing life all comes together, running through, around, out of, and back to the Phoenix. Though it has sometimes been a bumpy ride, it’s never been a dull one. In the same way that food nourishes our bodies, travel nourishes our minds, and the arts nourish our souls. And writing about all of them nourishes me.