You can reach me at my UF email (ghoyle@ufl.edu) or via my personal email (ginnylawrimore@gmail.com).
I am a second-year master's student in journalism at the University of Florida.
I am from the small town of Glendale Springs, North Carolina. However, my "hometown" really needs to be thought of as an entire county, Ashe County, NC, as the towns intermesh to form one high school, one "downtown", etc. Situated along the Blue Ridge Mountains, it is a stunningly gorgeous area, the beauty of which I did not appreciate until I was long gone.
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| No lie, it really is this beautiful. |
I came to the University of Florida from Hillsborough, NC, after my now-husband was accepted for a full ride in the English Department. His going back to school seemed to align with my own desires to go back for a master's in journalism and, luckily, the lovely folks in charge of admissions at the j-school decided to let me in. My husband, Dave, is one year ahead of me in his studies - a first-year doctoral student in literature, specializing in 19th- and 20-century literature (and cultural ties to Marxism).
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| Me and Albert - BFF |
I came to UF with three years of newspaper experience - two as a copy-editor for The Herald-Sun in Durham, NC, and one as a reporter for The Chapel Hill Herald in Chapel Hill, NC. After getting my master's (assuming, of course, that I make it through the gauntlet that is the thesis process - haha), I plan to go back out into the field, hopefully landing another newspaper job - either as a copy-editor, reporter, or editor. Unfortunately, my job-seeking only extends to this area, as my husband will be in his PhD program for a minimum of four more years. Depending on job availability, I may apply to become an instructor at the community college level or go after something in PR at the university.
A list of things I love: Spending time with my husband; my adorable beagle-australian shepherd mix, Baxter (who is completely bratty, but we only have ourselves to blame); biking (three miles to campus and back); reading for fun (mostly fiction); cooking(!) - I love to try new recipes and am a bit of a type-A hostess (I blame my mother for that one); taking photographs; watching films (of all types, but favorite genre is horror); reading the newspaper before bed (it creates a bit of a delay for the local news cycle and makes for interesting dreams, but is a unalterable habit); going out for my weekly girls' night (rain or shine, on Friday nights).
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| This is my dog, Baxter, aka, BooHoo. |
My writing experience mostly stems from my reporting days, where I covered Orange County government, the Town of Hillsborough, city and county schools, and whatever else needed covering. My editing experience is the two years I spent on the night shift copy-desk at The Herald-Sun. (Note: Some people couldn't fathom the idea of working 5 p.m. to 1 a.m., but it was actually pretty outstanding.) Also, I spent six (awful) months serving as an editor of training manuals for GRU here in town.
In the last few months, I have read: Black Like Me, The Catcher in the Rye (for the zillionth time), Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters, Franny and Zoey, Nine Stories (I read everything by JD Salinger as a tribute to his death), The Power of Now, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and I am currently reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (to see what the fuss is all about). Next, I plan to read the new Anna Quindlen.
Some interesting tidbits about me: When I was a but a wee fetus, I detached from my mom's uterine wall and, somehow, managed to re-attach days later. For a few years growing up, I lived without electricity or running water (outhouse included). When I was four, I survived a pit bull mauling that left me with more than 200 stitches inside and out (mostly on my back legs). I was working at The Herald-Sun during the Duke-Lacrosse case (talk about a perfect storm of race, class and sex.) Oh, and I got married this summer.
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| Notice the "bride and groom" cows behind us! |
Also, I tend to hear lyrics completely incorrectly. For example, just this week I discovered that in "Oh, Yoko," the line is "in the middle of a cloud," when I thought it was "in the middle of a crowd." Also fell for "there's a bathroom on the right" instead of "bad moon on the rise." The title of my blog comes from my mishearing a line from Toto's "Africa," that goes "there's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do." I was busted by a college girlfriend after belting out "there's nothing that a hundred men on mars could ever dooo."
I regularly read the Gainesville Sun, Newsweek, the New Yorker (on occasion, and only the fiction section and "Talk of the Town", npr.com (and daily newscast), nytimes.com, and cnn.com.
This semester, I am also taking Intro to Statistics (oh the humanity) and Social Movements and Sexualization.
For my thesis, I plan to examine the role that class plays in user preference of social networking sites (MySpace and Facebook).
In this class, I hope to learn the techniques of literary journalism by looking at famous examples and by attempting the art myself. (I am also very excited to read some of the more noted authors, such as Hunter S. Thompson and Thomas Wolfe.)
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