who is michael kelly?

At the documentary production office that has hired me as an unpaid summer intern, we get a lot of unwanted books. Things people picked up for past shows, random promotional copies, even roadmaps. I picked through some of them earlier last week, bypassing the small library we collected on Poland, picking up a paperback copy of "Reagan: A Life in Letters", but my heart about stopped when I found "Michael Kelly: Things Worth Fighting For."

In April 2003, Michael Kelly was the editor-at-large for the Atlantic Monthly; I was a freshman at a New England college that put the "liberal" in "liberal arts," the kind of place where I wasn't the only 18-year old with a subscription to the Atlantic. The thick, texty issues usually piled up unread in a corner in my dorm; I was busy. I managed to pick up the May 2003 issue on time, though, when it arrived in early April.

In April 2003, we had been at war for about two weeks. I read the Atlantic as I half-listened to my friend Jesse's coffeehouse guitar performance, where he sang "American Pie" and "This Land is Your Land," including the pessimistic second and third verses as an act of protest against our brand-new skirmish in the desert. With acoustic guitar behind me, I read a piece called "Letter from Kuwait" by Michael Kelly. An embedded reporter about to head out to Iraq, Kelly wrote about what he called "phony peace," the period before the current Iraq war and the one before it when, though everyone from Jacques Chirac to dirty college students was calling for peace, we all knew we were going to war. He described "human shields" who traveled to Iraq intending to stand in the way of the first bombs; of course, as it became apparent that the bombs were actually coming, they split. Yup, the war was really happening; even the idealists have left town.

Kelly wrote in early March, before Bush had delivered his ultimatum to Saddam; not two weeks before that, I had attended my first protest, an enormous anti-war march in New York that attracted upwards of 200,000, including 400 from my school alone. Kelly wasn't exactly criticizing all this hot-air protesting, my sign-waving and hollering, but the result was the same. Not even two months after testing out my activist waters, this random writer was making me question its entire phony peace purpose. Our parents had fought to actually end a war and had, in a way succeeded; not one person I met at the giant protest expected their actions to change anything.

I couldn't get this man and his clear-eyed writing out of my head. I listened to Jesse play and thought about Woody Guthrie, my parents, human shields, Jesse and me, all protestors with wildly varying goals. I couldn't figure out what we had to do with each other, and that made me crazy. All I could do was think in metaphor.

The next morning, April 4, in those early days of a war we all figured would be over soon, I checked the news online and saw that a journalist had been killed in Iraq. It was Michael Kelly.

That was the catalyst I needed. I sat down and wrote about war and peace, protest ballads, and what it meant to be an idealistic college student during a war that couldn't find any reasons for happening, but took down a few brilliant journalists in the meantime.

In short, Michael Kelly moved me. And finding his book, over two years later, I am moved again. This summer in my work as a television intern I have realized that I want to write instead, be a print journalist. What I really want, though, is to write like Michael Kelly.

I could never hope, of course, to match the man's wit or effortless grace with words. The more I read in "Things Worth Fighting For," the more I despairingly realize I'm just dancing around the feet of a giant. I've got other idols I'm dying to emulate too-- Frank Rich, David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Sridhar Pappu-- but Michael Kelly started it all, so this little adventure will bear his name. Hopefully by taking this leap, writing no longer just for myself but actually making it publicly available, that I can improve, go beyond flushed ramblings to something readable and worthwhile.

I'm worried that it's presumptuous to start a blog that no one will probably read, to name it something as obscure as "The Michael Kelly Chase," or just to be a college student claiming she's going to write like a journalistic giant, a dead one at that. But this is where those worries end; I'll never keep it up if I don't just put myself out there for once. Goodbye insecurity, goodbye presumptuous, and let's begin.