s Polly’s column grew in popularity, she expanded her gardening content to provide her readers with elements of local history and human interest. She never wrote about her own garden but instead highlighted community beautification projects and gardening topics designed to increase civic pride. Her Sunday columns reminded readers of the role gardens play in the life of the community. In 1989, two years after Polly’s death, the Federated Garden Clubs of Macon published Selections of Garden Ventures featuring more than one hundred of Polly’s newspaper columns. s a high school student, Cynthia McMullen ’76 knew she wanted to pursue a career in journalism. During her senior year, she searched for a college that was coed and offered journalism as a major. “So ending up at Wesleyan,” she said, “was really kind of a fluke.” An admission counselor from the College visited her high school and spoke to only two students from Cynthia’s 600-member senior class. “I was getting all this personal attention,” she remembered. “I’d never been south of the Mason-Dixon line. I didn’t even have a chance to visit the campus until my first day of school!” Although she was determined to major in journalism, Cynthia found that Wesleyan’s liberal arts emphasis refined her natural writing talent and prepared her for a successful career. At Wesleyan, Cynthia doublemajored in English and French with a concentration in journalism and later earned a master’s degree in literature from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her first full-time job was director of information services for Wesleyan. At the time, twenty-five-year newspaper veteran Bud Paine was Wesleyan’s director of community relations and helped Cynthia refine her news-release writing skills and story-pitching abilities. She also
“People who told me I didn’t have to major in journalism to be a journalist were right. But you do need to be able to communicate well. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
–Cynthia McMullen ’76
coordinated, hosted, and wrote scripts for two monthly public service television shows for the College.
journalist were right,” McMullen said. “But you do need to be able to communicate well. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
advantage of the opportunity to write for newspapers, magazines, and businesses across the United States.
While writing has been an integral part of every job Cynthia has held, her eight-year stint as a features reporter and columnist with the RichmondTimes Dispatch has been her only full-time writing job. She was one of many applicants vying for the position, but the only one who prepared a David Letterman-styled list of “The Top 10 Reasons You Should Hire Me.” A year after she was hired, Cynthia was offered the opportunity to develop a weekly column. She called it “Whatever” because she was told she could write about anything she pleased. She also wrote the weekly “Eye on R-Town” column in which she featured quick observations on things going on around Richmond.
Bottom line, she said: “Read. Write. Read. Write. Learn good grammar, keep up with the King’s English, love what you do, and if the kind of writing you lust after doesn’t come easily, pursue other options in related fields. I could have spent my life indulging my literary fantasy and penning really bad novels – you know, the kind you can buy six months later on amazon.com for 98¢ plus $3.99 shipping. Instead, I’ve had half a dozen interesting jobs, each one of which has challenged me as a writer, but in very different ways.”
Her writing appeared in many publications including The Brunswick News, The Villager, Coastal Illustrated, Golden Isles Life Magazine, Georgia Journal, O, Georgia!, and Kalliope. The topics she wrote about were varied but included travel, history, nature, art, music, theatre, food, antiques, fashion, and advice. She became widely known for her personal experience and humor columns before she turned her talents to the field of fiction writing.
Currently, Cynthia is director of public relations and communications for Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy in Richmond where she coordinates public relations plus internal and external communications. “People who told me I didn’t have to major in journalism to be a
efore Sharon Smith Henderson ’54 was born, her father edited a newspaper. While she was growing up, he owned a printing company and Sharon would help by writing copy for brochures, community events, and historical sites. She studied music at the Wesleyan Conservatory and after graduation was a professional classical concert singer for many years. When Sharon married an engineer whose career involved frequent relocation, she took
In 1997, Sharon published a book containing a selection of her newspaper columns entitled From My Veranda: The Wit, Wisdom and Whimsy of the Small-Town South. Just three years later, she was winning major awards for literary fiction. At the 2000 Southeastern Writers Association Conference, Sharon won first place in novel writing for Just the Two of Us, first place in advanced fiction writing for her novella In the Dead of Summer, and second place in short fiction for Journey in August. She also garnered the Anderson Award, which is the Conference’s top prize and presented to the best all-around Wesleyan Magazine Winter 2010