Skip to main content
Over the next three days, you’ll be hearing from Willamette Week staff on the importance of expanding our arts and culture coverage. To expand our coverage, we are asking for your support. With each contribution, we can shine a brighter light on the art and artists that entertain us, provide us with tears and comfort, bring us together, and challenge us to be better.
Yesterday, you heard from Aaron Mesh, Willamette Week’s News Editor. Today, an essayist, illustrator, biological woman/psychological bruh, Brianna Wheeler.
- - -
By Brianna Wheeler, WW’s Podcast Host
I am the writer I am today because of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with at Willamette Week.
This year, I completed my first full-length manuscript, a historical nonfiction/contemporary memoir crossover that traces my ancestry all the way back to the raid on Harpers Ferry, the insurrection that led to the Civil War. My grandmother was an avid historian, and after her death, she left a small mountain of news clippings, books with Post-it notes hanging from select pages, and letters sent and received from cousins across the country. Once organized, all these papers told a breathtaking story of our family’s escape from slavery.
I’m not sure I would have looked at my grandmother’s research with the same intention, much less ability, if it hadn’t been for the confidence instilled in me by the editors I’ve worked with at WW, both while hosting the Dive podcast and writing the Potlander column. In the almost three years I’ve been helming it, the Potlander column has become, with the stewardship of each of my editors, an inclusive, socially conscious, personal and poetic weekly tribute to Oregon cannabis that is as much Brianna’s weed diary as it is Willamette Week’s version of a cannabis curriculum.
Furthermore, hosting the Dive these past several months has refined my lens in a way straightforward writing couldn’t, and the monologues I write each week not only force me to look at the world around me in different ways, but also express my own biracial, femme POV in a way that seeks common ground with an overwhelmingly white male audience.
This is all to say independent journalism has powerful advocates who are far better equipped than I to praise its value, but what I can speak to is how alternative press can be a launch pad for aspiring writers to become good, and for good writers to become great, and great writers to become legendary.
So next time you fall in love with a new author, journalist, documentarian or news podcast host, check the stats and see which local alt-news paper you should be thanking for giving them their start.
(Brianna Wheeler’s debut memoir, Altogether/Different, will be published by Korza Books in spring 2023.)