New places, familiar faces

Amish Mennonites

Italian food in Amish Country? Yep. I was in eastern Iowa this past weekend for the annual board meeting of the Quill and Scroll Society, an honorary society for high school journalists that's based at the University of Iowa. We board members went out to dinner Saturday night and found ourselves in Kalona, 20 miles southwest of Iowa City, at an upscale restaurant called Tuscan Moon Grill. Kalona is the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi River and is known as the quilt capital of Iowa. En route to the restaurant, we passed a couple of families in traditional clothing and their horse-drawn buggies, which explained the road apples and pungent smell wafting into our car.

Who would have guessed I'd sit down to grilled scallops and shrimp, with garlic polenta and sauteed vegetables, washed down by a Sapporo beer in a place like that? (Especially when the place next door, the Kalona Bakery, was selling brats for $2.50 and and pork burgers for $3.50.) Believe me, it was the equal of any restaurant in Portland. Consider another Iowa stereotype busted for this West Coast boy.

Adjusting to Iowa City.  The following morning, I met with Inara Verzemnieks, a former staff writer at The Oregonian, for breakfast and conversation at the Bluebird Diner in Iowa City. I had the privilege of recruiting Inara to the newspaper, just a few months after she'd graduated from the University of Washington and completed a summer internship at The Washington Post. In the 14 years since, I have marveled at the reporter and elegant writer she has become. (She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2006.)

Inara took a buyout last year and, with husband Nick, moved to Iowa City this summer to pursue an  an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing, an English Department program that's separate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She's just begun the three-year program, but she thinks she'd like to teach, possibly at the community college level. I've seen her around high school students and other young people and I think she'd be marvelous in that role. Inara is fiercely intelligent and a woman whose emotions are never far from the surface, whether talking about a visit to Latvia to see relatives or the multiple adjustments she and Nick are making to their new life in Middle America.


Settling in to Pittsburgh. A week earlier, when I was in Pittsburgh, I reconnected with another young journalist with Oregon ties. Lori joined me as I met with Moriah Balingit for drinks at a bar in the Shadyside neighborhood. Moriah was a student at the University of Oregon when I met her, and she did an internship at The Oregonian in the spring of 2006, working out of a suburban bureau.

She landed an entry-level reporting job at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and has been there going on three years. She covers night cops, so she's got a brutal schedule working from 4 p.m. to midnight and beyond. She's originally from Sacramento, but seems to enjoy her new city -- the so-called Paris of Appalachia. Moriah has quickly become part of Steeler Nation, though she retains a passion for her Oregon Ducks (ranked No. 1 in the nation as of this writing!). Journalistically, she's had to adapt to the new media environment and now files a majority of her stories directly to the newspaper's web site -- par for the course these days, throughout the industry, when it comes to breaking news.

I'm glad I got to see these two friends and former colleagues. To see them fulfilling the promise they displayed as young journalists, while still in or barely out of college, is inspiring. To see them genuinely happy in their new environments, embracing new situations and challenges, is satisfying. And to know they are just two among the hundreds of aspiring journalists I've helped or encouraged, well, that's  immensely gratifying.

Photo credit: Kalona Historical Group Tours