At the College, we tout the close bonds our faculty and students forge together during their time of shared learning. For one alumna, that relationship gave her the confidence to pursue a lifelong dream and turn it into a career.
by Jac Chebatoris ’94
You could sense his arrival before he would even appear. Suddenly, there he was: an excited look in his eye, his books and binders under his arm and the tails of his seersucker suit rippling like sails on a mast as he made his flurry of an entrance. The room seemed not big enough to contain the gale force. With a swoop of his hand, pushing his large glasses back up on his nose, Professor Franklin Ashley would commence.
The room was special, of course. “Of course” meaning that if you know 66 George Street in Charleston, you know that it’s the location of Randolph Hall, that Ionic-columned beauty of a building – and one of the oldest college buildings in the country that is still in use today. We, Professor Ashley’s class, were given special permission to hold class in Alumni Hall, which was built in 1828–9 and still gives you pause when you visit, even after more than a few years away – making you stop like the tourists that you used to curse in the August heat, rushing to class and trying to avoid tripping on the brick sidewalks.
In that classroom in Randolph Hall, next to a chalkboard that had been rolled in, Ashley sat – no, he never really sat, but moved in cadence with his thoughts: his anecdotes, narratives and bon mots keeping time as he walked a few paces before turning on a heel and then walking back before stopping dramatically, like a player in summer stock. You recognize now, post-college, that it was an effective way of holding the attention of the class. It held mine, I know. I hung on the words of his stories recounting interviews for TV Guide with celebrities such as Faye Dunaway. He had seen things. Been places. And wrote about them.
This was a magazine writing class, and the first one held at the College. Ashley was in his element, and our assignment, to be finished in time before graduation, was to send in a professional pitch letter and piece to any magazine we chose. Someone in class selected Dog Fancy. Others played it safe and picked smaller, local publications. I loved music, something I had in common with Ashley, an accomplished jazz piano player who played around town, and – I now realize – was probably coming off a late night himself sometimes, much like many of his students, no doubt. It didn’t occur to me not to shoot high for this – that’s the gift of naiveté and the same gift that came in handy as I upped the stakes a few years later. For my assignment, I decided to send mine to what at the time was the coolest, hippest music magazine out there besides Rolling Stone – SPIN magazine in New York City.
There was a local musician who played the usual spots in Charleston (the Music Farm, Cumberland’s, T-Bonz), and he just seemed to have whatever it is that you think will make a person famous. I’d drag my friends and roommates, Pam and Carolyn, along with me (I still owe you, Pam, for the night that full bottle of Bud Light fell on your head from the railing above us!). But instead of now just enjoying the show, I was there in “reporter mode,” even if I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. (Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous perfectly nails the notion of that so overused query: “So, what are your influences?”)
The piece I wrote on Edwin McCain (whose brand of coffeehouse-style folk-rock soon earned him a record deal with Atlantic Records) ended up being 11 pages long. After I submitted it, I couldn’t have been more proud to get the handwritten rejection letter from Bob Guccione Jr., the editor of SPIN, who wrote, “I read your piece. It’s very well written, though too long for publication. … keep writing, it’s hard but you’re talented.”
The Dog Fancy girl never even got so much as a courtesy note back. And here was my reply from SPIN! I loved it. I loved writing the piece. Professor Ashley spurred that enthusiasm in all of us.
“You’ve got to be perspicacious!” he would bellow, his eyes, darting to one side then holding his gaze for maximum effect, while the word hung in the air. We’d wait for the next sentence to fall while he would nod, stammer, laugh – all of it his punctuation in the delivery of a good line.
Perspicacious is still one of my favorite words. I’ve written it on cocktail napkins for strangers, and even on paper towels in the absence of paper. It means “astutely aware.” To be a good writer, you should get in touch with that aspect of observation. It was soon after I had written my McCain profile that Professor Ashley pulled me aside. “OK, OK,” he started. “So ….”
I waited, knowing the beat that we were both waiting in between his thoughts was about to crescendo to something good. Or so I hoped.
“What we’re talking about here … [long pause] is you playing pro ball, OK?”
I knew immediately what he meant. Though the passages I wrote about my singing “The Tide Is High” in front of my third-grade class in my diary and the poems I crafted for Christmas cards while I was growing up were pretty good and praised by my parents and my brother – I mean, c’mon: I wasn’t going to be a writer. I mean, that’s for other people. People like Franklin Ashley. But now the seed was planted.
A few years later, I moved to New York City without a job or really any good idea of what I was to do there, just the knowledge that I wanted to go there (that naiveté again). I landed a temp job at Newsweek magazine. I started in the Letters Department, sorting the letters to the editor and mailing out responses. Vibuhti Patel, who was a contributing editor for Newsweek International and distinguished by her sari and her warm nature and constant smiling face (a scarce commodity, it can be true, in Manhattan), told me about a job I should apply for as the secretary to the editor of the Arts and Entertainment Department.
That editor was Sarah Petit, an Ivy League graduate who had sent more than one writer in her department out of her office in tears. I applied and got the job. Usually the way into a place like Newsweek was through Yale (or more like Harvard or Brown), an internship (after you attend Yale or Harvard) or straight-up nepotism. I had none of those things going for me. I was a graduate of a small, liberal arts school in South Carolina – who did I think I was anyway? But there was always that reminder that stayed etched in my wiring, into my very cellular makeup: It was Professor Ashley’s acknowledgment that I could do it. I was on par. I was going to play pro ball.
In 2003, my boss, who was only 36 years old, got sick and passed away from lymphoma. I had my first published piece while she was in the hospital. I was promoted to a researcher, reporting for other writers for their pieces, and then began reporting on my own stories. Then I wrote smaller pieces on my favorite artists like The Killers and Ryan Adams, and those then gave way to my first full pages on maybe not my favorites (ha!) like the Jonas Brothers. In 2008, the magazine world’s implosion began, and I left Newsweek and returned home to South Carolina after nearly a decade in New York.
This past October, my boyfriend suggested that we should find Professor Ashley on our next trip to Charleston. I called the School of the Arts for his email address, and soon, there he was – sitting in front of me at a booth in Saffron Café on East Bay Street.
His glasses might be smaller now, but his presence and energy, not any less so. He was holding a book from a reading he had gone to the night before. It was The Good Girls Revolt – a book about Newsweek by Lynn Povich, who was one of the first female editors there in the 1960s. In that meeting, Professor Ashley did as he always had done, educating me on how to further be an engaged, thoughtful and, yes, perspicacious writer.
If one day the tables turn and I’m ever asked, “What are your influences?” my professor, Franklin Ashley, will be at the top of the list.
– Based in Greenville, S.C., Jac Chebatoris ’94 is a yoga instructor, senior editor for Town magazine and a freelance writer who has contributed stories to the Los Angeles Times as well as Tempus, a magazine published by Tempus charter jets, for which she’s interviewed Grammy Award winners, PGA golfers, top chefs and more.
Illustration by Dave D’Incau Jr.
