Spencer Bailey

I didn't think I was going to get in.

It was a big shock to my system, especially given where I came from in middle school.

You could barely pay me to pick up a book and then to be at the best journalism school in the country.

It was a journey, a portal, a dream, whatever you want to call it.

quite an evolution, but I felt really lucky to have gotten in and the timing was right because the economy was still really in rough shape in 2009.

And I felt like, okay, this is a 10 month masters.

I'll go, I'll learn the shoe leather reporting on the street and hopefully have a better idea and vision for where I go next.

And hopefully the economy will be in better shape.

All those things turned out to be true.

I want to talk to you about this shoe leather in a moment.

But the summer before you started at Columbia, you took Gordon Lish's infamous fiction workshop, which you've described as 12 weeks of sentence by sentence dismantling.

First the word, then the sentence, then the structure.

And you said you were both inspired and terrified by him.

What was most inspiring and what was most terrifying?

Well, he had this very like Svengali sort of presence in the room.

Everyone just sort of oohing and aahing over his every word in a way.

I think I was intimidated because this is the man who edited Raymond Carver's stories.

I mean, those incredible stories.

And then not to mention the reputation this workshop had by that point accrued, I would say.

You know, you had writers like Amy Hempel coming through that workshop.