A Freelance Writing Assignment to Grow On

Back in September, thanks to a referral by publishing friend David Wilk, I was hired to write a 1200-word article for the November/December issue of H Magazine, the publication of the cable channel known as History® (formerly History Channel®). On a rush basis, they asked me to do a piece about what would be History®’s December 8-9 broadcast of a new 4-hour miniseries on Bonnie & Clyde, airing simultaneously on History® and sister networks Lifetime® and A&E®. Materials I could review–for a sense of the production–were scant. Before accepting the job, I submitted a brief opener to what I might write, a kind of imagined interior monologue of Clyde Barrow sitting behind the wheel of a car waiting for Bonnie Parker. When I heard back that they liked that bit, I knew I had a path to successful completion of the article. When I handed it in five days later the editors liked it, and so it runs below pretty much as I turned it in, with them adding their own title (I had called it “A Bonnie & Clyde for Our Times,) pictures, captions, and their own headlines and sub-heads. 

A few days after the mini-series aired last Sunday and Monday, I got some print copies of the magazine in the mail. I’ve scanned the relevant parts of the issue and am sharing them all below. I later found it’s also online [link since taken down], but I think it’s more interesting to read the actual glossy pages, so here they are. You may read them in full by pausing the blog’s slide show at the top right corner. As readers of my blogs will know, I write a lot of personal, reportorial, expository, and essay-type prose, which made it a special treat to channel my imagination in to the fictional exercise that makes up the first half of the article. This is a sort of writing I have not done for a long time, and I’m glad I had the chance to do it here. Hoping to do more like it in 2014. Thank you David Wilk, History® and the editors of H Magazine.