A farewell to newspapers, but more stories to come

I have just made the most difficult decision of my life and accepted a buyout to leave The Inquirer, my home for 30 years.

I still can't believe I'm leaving, but I am.

This newspaper, filled with wonderful colleagues, has given me the opportunity to tell so many amazing stories. It allowed me to do my very best, to be my very best, and to live such a productive life, and for that I will always be grateful.

I grew up here, developed my writing skills and my philosophy of writing. As I wrote about all of you, I learned about myself.

I came to believe that in a world overrun with noise and news and facts and information and websites and channels, the way to penetrate the din, to reach people and stir people and unite people, is by telling stories.

And my mission became clear: to use those stories to celebrate life.

I've long carried around a quote from William Faulkner in my wallet, from a speech he gave after winning the Nobel Prize. He said the writer's duty, his privilege, is "to help man endure by lifting his heart." In my own small way, for the last 30 years, that's what I've tried to do for Inquirer readers.

I believe stories work on so many levels. They can change the lives of the people they are about, give those lives meaning, dignity, and validation, even bring new opportunities. I have seen this happen time and again.

I look at my 2008 story on Jordan Burnham, the Upper Merion High School senior who suffered from depression and jumped out of a nine-story window - and survived. He was just coming out of his coma, unable to speak, when his family let me into his life, and I told his story and chronicled his recovery.

The story was incredibly intimate, but therein lay its power. The family took an enormous risk by trusting me to enter their lives at a most uncertain time, but that story gave meaning to Jordan's experience. Immediately after it appeared, he began getting calls to speak about suicide and depression at colleges and high schools all over America. His journey has taken him to Congress and seated him beside the secretary-general at the United Nations.

Who could ever have predicted? I just set out to understand why an 18-year-old member of the homecoming court and star athlete would jump, and how on earth he could survive the fall.

That same year I also did a series on the uninsured before Obamacare. I did one story on Ruby Spencer, 61, who had a tumor the size of a football in her belly, and was just passed on from emergency room to clinic and back again. After the story appeared, a hospital stepped forward and performed the surgery, saved her life. Years later I got a picture of her with a birthday cake, and a note from her son thanking me.

Without that story, without The Inquirer, he said, there would have been no birthday, no cake.

Stories also work on a global level. We all draw sustenance, feel part of a community, from stories that celebrate our humanity and finest qualities, our loyalty and love and determination and faith and passion.

I make an important point here. The stories must be true, honest, and authentic. Schmaltz is like bad cake icing. A great story well told is like a home-cooked meal. The best stories are understated, allowed to simmer and come to fruition in their own way and time. And there are never shortcuts in storytelling. Invest the time, do the reporting.

While the newspaper has been wonderful, I've long had this desire to see what I could do on my own, to tell stories in other forms and new places.

The time is right in life for me to take a chance, a risk.

As I leave the paper now, I'm excited to see what comes next, open to all ideas and opportunities. In the short run, I plan to finish a book on storytelling, including a collection of my favorite stories, and to teach a class in narrative journalism at Penn.

I also hope to do more speaking, which I have loved, sharing many of my favorites and spreading the gospel that stories have the power to change the world.

I have come a long way since college, since the response to one of my summer internship applications included this sentence: "Frankly, the syntax in your second paragraph is a disaster."

I can't predict the future. But I can say with certainty that my heart will always be here with The Inquirer.