By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Beth Macy got her start as a writer in a stand of lilacs near her home.
The youngest, late arriving, child in a family of four, she spent a lot of time alone. She would hide among the lilacs and listen to those who came by. She heard the “strange and beautiful, about justice and injustice.”
Beth Macy addresses graduates
That’s what Macy would write about years later as a journalist, winning national honors for her books, magazine articles, and newspaper reporting.
Macy told the graduates at the Saturday morning commencement ceremonies at Bowling Green State University that after spending four years or so “honing your distinctive voice, now it’s your turn to be heard.”
She continued: “Don’t forget to see your corner of the world with your slant, that tilted way of looking at life that only you and you alone can provide. Find your own stand of lilacs and be still among them. Look up and reach out.”
If Macy at 53 could whisper in the ear of her 22-year-old self, she tell her to “remember the lilacs.”
Interim Provost John Fischer said Macy has made a career writing about “the outsiders and underdogs.”
She’s authored three books, including a forthcoming exploration of the opioid epidemic.
Macy recalled her graduation day when she was likely concerned about how she was going to move all her belongings to Columbus in a 20-year-old VW Beetle. Would the car even make it? The only thing holding the battery in place was a cutting board wedged in the back seat.
Awaiting her was her first job, a $200 a week position with a city magazine that largely involved updating the publication’s restaurant guide.
The idea for becoming writer stemmed from a fourth grade teacher giving her the book “Harriet the Spy.” Here Macy said she found a kindred spirit.
At BGSU, she found people to help her shape her own talent advising her she should be able to come back from any meeting, gathering at a neighborhood bar, or church social with three story ideas.
After her year of calling restauranteurs asking if they served Mahi-Mahi and accepted American Express, she moved on, eventually settling in at the Roanoke Times in Virginia, studying that corner of the world with her particular slant.
“I didn’t set out to write about outsiders and underdogs, but lo and behold after a decade it dawned on me that those were the stories I wrote the best,” she said.
She wrote about a furniture maker who fought to keep his business afloat aginst a tide of goods imported from China. She wrote about an African-American page in a local library who buoyed by a community was admitted to Harvard.
She wrote about a Rwandan refugee who started two companies with his grown sons, yet continued to drive a school bus.
Macy also offered some personal advice. “Ditch the awful partner as soon as possible.”
As someone who kissed her share of ugly frogs before finding someone who made her laugh and shared all the chores, she advised: “Life is fleeting. Only the people who want the best for you should be on your team, especially your home team.”
Macy said she would not have been able to achieve what she has without her husband’s support. “Choosing a partner is the single most important decision you’ll make.”
And Macy told them, to great applause, to put down their telephones. “Gaze in the eyes of your fellow human beings.”
It’s not a coincidence that the opioid abuse epidemic, which she covers in “Dopesick,” her third book, “came at the time when people your age and in high school and middle school have the highest rates of depression and anxiety and suicide than ever before. We have a second epidemic of loneliness.”
The more one’s life revolves around social media the less interest someone has in dating, driving, and sex, she said.
“The more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to be unhappy,” she said. According to scientific studies, she said, having weak social connections has the same effect on life span as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
“What’s better, of course,” she said, “is to spend our energy on work that makes us happy and enriches our larger community.”
This weekend in four ceremonies BGSU sent 2,341 new graduates out in the world with hopes they’ll do just that.
As BGSU President Rodney Rogers told her as they looked out at the graduates arrayed before them: “Look at all these lives changed by education.”
