Five Questions for the Fellows: Chris Solomon

How has the adjustment been from working as a freelance journalist to a Scripps fellow?

It has been a little bit of an adjustment to step off the nonstop treadmill of being a freelance journalist, where you are constantly trying to hunt down your next meal, and you are constantly looking at the clock, looking at your bank account, under several kinds of pressures. The fellowship has allowed me to slow down and take a deep breath. That has taken a little bit of adjustment but it's been really gratifying to be able to do it.

I had been warned by friends who've taken these fellowships in the past that it can be disorienting at first. I'm a pretty Type A personality and I almost didn't know what to do with myself besides go to classes. I felt a little lost without producing stuff all the time. But a really great thing starts to happen when you're not constantly under deadline – your mind can unclench a little bit. I started to see story ideas everywhere. That's one of the things you want to start happening from a fellowship, is to be able to step back, breathe again, and start to see big pictures and big connections between things. 

You’ve mentioned before that with your newfound “free” time, you're doing a lot more reading. What is your favorite book, related or unrelated to your project, that you read recently?

I'm doing everything from rereading Marc Reisner’s classic book, Cadillac Desert, about the development of water in the West, to a relatively new book about the history of public lands in America, titled Making America's Public Lands by Adam Sowards.

One really good thing about the fellowship is it’s helping fill in a lot of the holes I have in my education as an environmental reporter. It’s giving me a lot of context, whether it's in water management in the West or just the history of public lands, for instance. I’ve since ordered a half dozen books that I'm hoping to read over the holidays, from John McPhee's classic book The Control of Nature to Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire.

What's been one of your favorite classes and why do you like it?

Perhaps the best one to date has been a class in the Law School on Fundamentals of Natural Resource Law with Michael Pappas. As environmental reporters, we often write about environmental impact statements, environmental assessments, and the Endangered Species Act, but for most of us, our knowledge of these things is a mile wide and an inch deep. This class dives into how these things work. 

One reason I was excited to go back to school was to take classes that feed me as a reporter and writer, and that I never took in college.

What is your favorite part of the fellowship so far? 

I think the best part of this fellowship is the other journalists. I've been a freelance writer for more than 20 years; I spend my days by myself, and one of the things I miss most about working at a newspaper was the conviviality, the collegiality, the shared experience, and the excitement of being in the room with other journalists who are the most fun, smart, weirdest people I know. It's really good to be in a room again with some of those really smart, fun, kind of offbeat people who I can tell are going to be friends for a really long time.

What do you like to do for fun in Boulder?

I really love the outdoors, so I looked forward to coming here. Boulder really is the outdoor town that everyone said it was. I've been trail running, six days a week, since the day I arrived. It has been fun to explore a new trail almost every day. I look forward to the winter and getting up into the mountains and doing some skiing. I've gone fly fishing with friends, and the fellows and I climbed a 14er together.