I am Sage & Blunt!!! It’s me! The mysterious, bespectacled brunette advice writer who’s been answering your letters for three years? It’s me!! If anyone was wondering.
I never, ever thought I would end up as editor in chief when I applied to work as a contributing advice columnist for The S&B my second year. I just loved writing, and I wanted experience writing creatively for an audience and working closely with other writers. Also, the prospect of reading anonymous letters detailing the internal and interpersonal conflicts of my peers — and the chance to wax lyrical on my own opinion of what I thought they should do next! — was admittedly tantalizing.
The advice column put me in touch with so many corners of Grinnell, and of myself. Responding to advice letters was time dedicated to meditating on my core values and beliefs, what I think of love, friendship, doing right by yourself and others. I felt all these secret connections with my letter writers, wondering if I had ever walked by them in the library or the dining hall, and daydreaming about what became of the crush or the fight they had originally picked up the pen to tell me about.
Moving on to edit the opinions section, where my job was to help other writers refine their voices and express their convictions as effectively as possible, only expanded that sense of connection. I met students and faculty from all over the country and the world, sometimes just through their writing and a series of emails, and I learned their stories. I wrote news and features pieces for the first time, went out into the field with a notebook and a tape recorder — it was an iPhone — and got to know people I might never have crossed paths with otherwise.
I’ve worn many hats at the paper, but my most cherished one will always be that of the columnist — the tenderness, the intrigue and surprise of it, the permission to be sappy and, well, blunt. Thank you to every single person who ever took the time to write out what was in their heart and trust a stranger with it, or who ever picked up the paper to read a Sage & Blunt piece – thank you even to all the people who wrote to me as a joke (I wish I had time to get around to the letter from the person with the catfish that won’t stop gnawing on their leg).
It seems wrong not to offer some kind of advice in my final farewell to The Scarlet & Black, so I will say this: my advice to anyone reading is to take the opportunities that appear before you. There are likely no good reasons not to. That’s what I did at The S&B – I just kept saying yes, and it led me to the greatest staff I’ve ever been a part of and the most worthwhile work I’ve ever contributed to putting out in the world.
Thank you to every writer, editor, photographer and graphic designer who has worked by my side these past few years. Thank you to Nadia Langley `23 and Allison Moore `24 for saying yes to the advice column and bringing me onto this team in the first place; thank you to my first editor Millie Peck `23, who made my writing so much better and indoctrinated me into the opinions section; thank you to our ferocious professional adviser Lyle Muller for your wisdom, your devotion and your fearlessness in telling the truths that matter; thank you to Maure Smith-Benanti, without whom nothing at this newspaper is possible, and thank you most of all to my co-editor in chief and soulmate Nora Kohnhorst `25, who took on this huge, scary responsibility before I did and showed me the ropes, who is an endless pleasure to work with and who I love more than I could possibly express in black ink on white paper. I am forever grateful.
With that, let the search for the next Sage & Blunt begin!