Pop Quiz: Sheelah Kolhatkar
Today I chat with Sheelah Kolhatkar, freelancer and staff writer at the New York Observer, where she covers publishing, media and culture. Prior to that, she worked on Wall Street.
What was the career path that took you to your current position at the Observer?
It was one of the least straightforward paths imaginable. I worked on Wall Street for five years, as an analyst at two hedge funds. It was a fascinating world to learn about and I had a wonderful mentor there, but I was miserable. I desperately wanted to do something else and I thought it might be writing and I didn’t know how to go about doing it. I spent a year traveling around Asia and working on a few little freelance assignments that I’d obtained through persistence and blind luck-some book reviews and a chapter of a travel guidebook about Mexico. During that time I also took a writing class, which helped me tremendously. After I came back I started working at the New York Observer as a part-time intern/factchecker, which eventually turned into an actual job.
You cover a lot of interesting topics for the Observer. How many of your stories are assigned and how many do you pitch?
This is a rough estimate, but I’d say that about a third of them are ideas that I come up with, a third are dictated by news and things that happen and therefore are obvious stories for me to work on and another third are the result of brainstorming sessions with my fabulous editor.
You follow a lot of what roles women in the arts take on. In terms of literature, you’ve covered chick-lit, sex columns and women’s anthologies. Do you see any new trends for women writers on the horizon?
I wish I could say that women writing lots of important foreign policy stories in the major current affairs magazines was looming on the horizon, but in fact the opposite appears to be happening. Mostly it seems as if women writers are encouraged to write in the first person or about whatever a particular editor’s perception of “women’s issues” is. So I guess if you asked me what new trends I’d like to see for women writers in the near future, it would be the reversal of this one.
What are you working on lately? I hear a story about filthy-rich New Yorkers?
What I’m working on can change from week to week. I would like to do more pieces about money and class, and on the way that politics is affecting culture and the media.
You do a good job of bringing the people you write about to life in your stories. Do you have any advice for breathing life into the ‘characters’ in a nonfiction piece?
I think that it’s important to convey the voice and personality of whoever you’re writing about as best you can, and in a lot of cases that just means getting out of the way and letting the person talk. I tend to put less of myself in a piece and much more of them, whoever they are. It helps to spend as much time with the people you’re writing about as possible and to pay attention to little details. Their body language can say a lot. And watching subjects interacting with other people or just moving through the world can be revealing.
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