David Giffels is an Akron native and co-author of the entertaining Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron. Earlier this year David snapped up first place for the 2004 Ohio Associated Press award in Broadcast Writing. This practical and insightful journalist is an Akron Beacon Journal columnist, but he's also shown versatility as a writer on MTV’s Beavis and Butthead. David also contributes as a comentator for WKSU 89.7FM.

You're a writer and columnist with the Akron Beacon Journal and other outlets. What is your background and education?

I’ve never lived anywhere else except Akron. I went to LeBron James High, which is St. Vincent-St. Mary, a great school...then I went to University of Akron, where I was an English major and encouraged by a not-very-smart counselor to take journalism, because he said you could either write for a newspaper or be an English teacher who writes his poems in the summer. I took enough journalism to get a dual major, and then I did a Masters of Creative Writing. When I graduated, I was already married and knew I had to have a job, and a friend at the Medina County Gazette called with an entry level position. Since it was a small paper, I started reviewing concerts and writing columns. Within a year I was the entertainment editor.

How did you make it over to the Akron Beacon Journal?
Once I decided that I wanted to do that kind of work, I decided that the only paper I wanted to work for was my hometown paper; I started making my connections at the Akron Beacon Journal and started doing freelance work for Northern Ohio Live, The River Burns and Free Times.

Did you always want to be a writer?
When I was in second grade, I had the Dr. Seuss book, My Book About Me; there's a page with a section in it that says, "What I want to be when I grow up." You could fill in the blank, and so I wrote 'Policeman' in pencil, and then erased it and over the top in ink I wrote, 'Writer.' That’s what I'm doing now professionally, and it's what I have always wanted to do.

What are your current interests in your column and your writings?
I became a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal kind of reluctantly. I was writing for the Sunday Magazine at the time, with a ton of freedom and long stories, and I didn’t want to give that up. I’m basically a very shy person, and more of a passive voice, I didn’t want the soapbox of a columnist, so I had to grow into it. Early on, I had co-written a book on the history of Akron in Wheels of Fortune, with Steve Love. Themes that I’m interested in now are the same: sense of place, a sense of history, isues of smart preservation, new urbanism, looking at the bones of our city and seeing how the good stuff can be kept. Akron has done some things downtown by keeping the facades and maintaining the sense of place, instead of putting up new cinderblocks. It's been good to see, especially since I knew the abandoned Akron in my college years. I’ve also become the guy who takes on the big causes; for example, after 9/11, we had this campaign called the firetruck fund. And then we recently launched this literacy campaign called "This City Reads!" I’ve been a columnist now for four years, and so it’s natural that I take on these causes.

What kind of influence do you think you can have as a columnist in a daily paper?
I’m like really, really self-conscious, partly by the twelve years of Catholic school upbringing. The first time I felt there was power within the columnist position was during the Fire Truck campaign. It wasn’t me that did anything, but I helped people feel there was a human voice in the newspaper that people could relate to. Whenever the term power is used, there’s the impression that columnists are power-mad people with pens, and there’s a legacy of that: rum-drinking, pistol-wielding rogues, which really doesn’t apply. So, I see it more of a responsibility that I take seriously. I recognize now that people do read and take it seriously; I recognize that I can influence change. I’d rather be a sort of mirror to what I think are the good parts of my community.

What’s wrong with Northeast Ohio? Why can’t we seem to catch up to the changing world?
A lot of it is old-school mindset that even young people who grow up here have, including me. There are all these echoes that you pick up when you grow up here, and you begin to believe certain stereotypes about yourself; and I’ve said many times that we have an inferiority complex. I look at it and it’s basically an insult to myself. I’m sure I could have made a life somewhere else, so have I settled for second rate? And that’s not true. I have a 4-minute commute, I have a house I could never afford in other markets, and I have things that I would struggle to get in other places. Plus, our thrift stores here rule.

As you've written, at one time Akron, Cleveland and Detroit were centers for innovation, industry and technology, sort of like the Silicon Valley of the early 1900’s. Do you see Akron’s historical technological competitiveness being leveraged in today’s world economy? What happened?

I’m gonna steal a little from you. When I wrote Wheels of Fortune, I said that Akron was the Silicon Valley of its day; not only were the big industries settled in one place, they also became a magnet for other entrepreneurs. After about 20 years, they weeded each other out, and it became this monolith of industrial headquarters and manufacturing, and eventually, everyone became very complacent. By the post-war years, it wasn’t necessary to invent anything new, since everything was already in place. And when that crumbled, no one had a model except for giant headquarters, a place where you would get a job in a factory that would pay really well. No one could come up with a creative way to make a living since that was all anyone knew. But what I saw with my peers at Akron University in the '80s was this intense creativity; people were writing about the industrial landscape, painting about it and creating magazines. A lot of people look at this region as raw material for the future. I see potential right now for a creative approach, where we are not worrying about Akron’s past and moving forward, and the deck is ready for someone to come in with their innovation. Akron has this world class polymer facility at the University, and Kent has this liquid-crystal facility, and they should be working together, but we haven’t figured out how to throw a net over it, keeping this really important intellectual base to retain these people in town after they graduate.

Do you think this region needs more media criticism, that is, an analysis of how local media is or isn’t meeting the needs of the region?
I wish there was more intelligent media criticism in this region. There’s almost nobody that I’ve seen in the media who can criticize the media without so much self-consciousness. It’s either jealousy (I wish I had that job) or it cynicism (they don’t know what they’re talking about), but no one does this with a reasoned approach, it's usually just sniping. It’s a small enough place that I can see why that is, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Do you also write fiction or poetry?
Yeah, and I always have. Not as much as I did before I had children, and not quite with the delusional idealism of becoming a great novelist...

You have also written for other projects, such as the Beavis & Butthead show on MTV. How did that come about?
Pretty much like all the great stories of entertainment history, it was a complete accident. When I wrote about the show in the Medina paper before it really took off, Mike Judge got a hold of those columns and sent me a hand-written note and asked me if I’d like to write for them. He had to send me a sample script since I didn’t know what a script was supposed to look like. I ended up writing for the rest of the run, and I wrote a little for the movie and the Christmas Special. I don’t get any residuals for this, just the residual glory, but it was a blast.

Why do you think your writing was appropriate for that show?
Actually, my writing wasn’t appropriate for that show. I was too self-conscious; I thought of myself as an artistic writer. I thought of myself as "Noel Coward clever" when I did these people. The best advice I got from Mike Judge was "Make it stupid," which means I worry too much about how it will be perceived, and sometimes I have to remind myself to make it stupid. Feagler also has a good piece of advice, which goes, "Don’t think too much." The best pieces of writing are the ones that I don’t think too much about. The City Reads project was a lot of community groups working together, and I was doing all this research and compiling data and doing interviews, but in the midst of it I wrote this column about how much I loved reading as a kid, and when I broke my arm in third grade and all I could do was write. The response to that was twenty fold to all these big journalistic pieces; people can hear it in your voice when you’re writing naturally.

If you weren’t writing for the Akron Beacon Journal, what would you be doing in this region, or would you have to move?
I think about this from time to time, even though I love what I do. I have to remind myself that I never intended to write for a newspaper, even though I’ve done this for a dozen years. Now, with kids in school I would not choose to do something different. I would like to think I would start something entrepreneurial that has nothing to do with journalism. I have other friends who I think we’ll get together with, and do what we’ve always wanted to do, like make a documentary film. I write for M-80 and it’s always these stupid poems or sketches that I would never send out, but feel I must do to blow off creative steam.

Do most of your friends find work and settle in Northeast Ohio, or do they leave?
I would say more than 50% have left, and I would say of those, maybe half would have preferred to stay, but couldn’t find work here, and half wanted to find work elsewhere. Enough are still here that I have a support group. I don’t like those terms 'cause it sounds like we are victims of Northeast Ohio. People have figured out that we’ve beat the system; I have a favorite quote on this, it applies to Cleveland as well: Akron has everything, but it only has one of everything. So I know where the great used bookshop is and where the great coffeeshop is located.

Why do you think young people leave?
Unfortunately, for a lot of them, their parents from the previous generation have encouraged them to leave because they think there’s no opportunity here. Others have made the decision themselves, like Go West Young Man. Those are the ones we should be looking to, because eventually they will need the free babysitting from grandparents, and we might be getting them back when they have some years of experience, but not while they're still young and idealistic.

That's a theme: this region shouldn't be looking at people in their 20's, but people in their 30's because it's the age when people are looking to settle down with kids and their career, and they are making longer term decisions about their lives. And this region is very attractive for raising a family...
That’s true. [Consultant] Rebbeca Ryan said whenever you look at the elements of a region that satisfy young people like arts and culture, it’s almost the same things that satisfy empty-nesters; they both fit a demographic profile. When we talk about this issue, it's not only about people in their 20s and 30s, but also about people in their 50s and 60s.

What are a couple things you think we could do about it?
I think one thing we can do, and this goes back to the power of the columnist, is to change attitudes. There are people now with columns who can look at this in a different way. I have no interest in explaining what brain drain is, but I have an interest in finding people who are interested in staying here and putting their voice in the paper and seeing where that goes, rather than sitting around the donut shop talking about how terrible things are.

Interview and photos by Thomas Mulready (:divend:)