T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N
Anything and Everything A Conversation with Mary Schmich
By Grace Adee Mary Schmich has been a metro columnist for the Chicago Tribune since 1992. In 2012, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary “ for her wide range of down-to-earth columns that reflect the character and capture the culture of her famed city.” She received international attention for her 1997 essay “Wear Sunscreen,” a hypothetical commencement speech that was adapted into a popular Baz Luhrmann music video and is frequently quoted to this day. Prior to her column, Schmich was a national correspondent for the Tribune and a reporter for several newspapers around the country. Investigations editor Grace Adee visited the swanky new Tribune newsroom speak with Schmich about shifting newsrooms, Brenda Starr comics, and the role of the “quiet column” in the information age. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. The Blue & White: How do you describe your column to people who may not have read it before? Mary Schmich: The great, what is your column about? People will ask me that. They’ll say, what do you do? I’ll say I write for the Chicago Tribune. They’ll say, what do you write at the Chicago Tribune? I’ll say I write a column. They’ll say, what is your column about? And I always feel stumped. It’s about everything. Years ago, a reader wrote me, back in the days when we only had snail mail. It was a postcard, and I still remember it. He said, you write an “anything” column––he put “anything” in quotes––and I like that. It’s the exact right description. I write an anything column, or an everything column. Because, from the time I started doing this, I’ve always thought that life is big and life is broad. The column that I wanted to write reflects that. I think when people think newspaper column, they automatically think politics. My philosophy is that politics is a piece of life, but most of us on any given day are thinking about a lot of other stuff. I want to write a column that taps into both what people are thinking and what they might not know, and what they might be interested in if they knew about it. It started off as a Metro column. It still technically is a Metro column. That’s a specific thing, too, and I always take that very seriously––this idea that it should reflect the city of Chicago somehow. Metro columns are almost extinct now, because the columns that are going to hit it big on the web are political outrage, especially national political outrage, or
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something involving a celebrity. I’ve taken the stance that we are in Chicago, and so let’s root all of this in Chicago, even when the focus is on everything else. BW: Would you say that the personal is political in the case of your column? That even through the specificity, the focus on various aspects of life in this city, it’s still a political column in a sense? MS: No, I would not define my column as political. But I would say that the personal is universal. I would say that the political is philosophical. I think we’ve really warped the way we think about the world by thinking that politics is the big barrel that everything exists in. No. It’s a thing in the barrel. At the same time, things that are not overtly political do have some political tinge. I was once had dinner with Studs Terkel and Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood completely ignored me until at some point it was kind of rude to just pretend I wasn’t at the dinner. So she turned to me at some point and just said, “So what do you…..do?” I said I write a column, and she said, about what? And Studs intervened. He said, “Well, it’s not a political column….but, you see, it is.” And I thought, that’s exactly right, Studs. It’s not, but you see, it is. BW: You talked a little bit about the extinction of the Metro column. Could you talk a little bit more about how the role of the columnist has changed across the past few decades that you’ve been writing?
The Blue and White
