Established in 1922, The Garfield Messenger has hosted generations of Bulldog writers, many of whom have gone on to successful careers in the field. Ann Dornfeld, Eli Sanders, and Pauls Toutonghi are professional writers and journalists who have flourished from their Messenger roots and continue to carry on its legacy.
Marine photographer and freelance journalist Ann Dornfeld is known for her Seattle Public Schools exposés on abuse by disciplinary staff and disparities in exercise time in lower-income schools, which won her awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and others. Now a reporter for KUOW, Dornfeld focuses on racial and socioeconomic issues.
1995 graduate Eli Sanders has written for The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The American Prospect, and The Stranger, where he served as associate editor. His book, “While the City Slept” tells the gut-wrenching true story of the murder of two young lovers, Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, in July 2009. Sanders’ account, first featured in The Stranger, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for news feature, and was a finalist for the Edgar Award, Best Fact Crime, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
For author and journalist Pauls Toutonghi, good grades in school were not something that came easily. “I was academically ineligible for the baseball team,” he said. “I had a 1.8 GPA in my sophomore year.” Fortunately, a writing teacher’s confidence in him was “transformative.”
“He told me,” Toutonghi recalled, “‘You’re going to [get a Masters in Fine Arts] and you are going to publish books.’”
After graduating and sending out as many pitches as he could, Toutonghi was assigned his first article in 2001, a Sports Illustrated piece about “the first Latvian professional basketball player.” From there, he wrote articles for publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker, and won a Pushcart Prize for his first published short story. However, a career in journalism is often far from linear. “For every published article there’s probably been 30 rejections or so,” Toutonghi reflected. These unreliable means of earning a living inspired Toutonghi to further his education. “As a part of grad school you teach,” Toutonghi said,“and I really loved it. I could see myself making a living that way.” Since 2007, Toutonghi has been a professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland. He writes books alongside teaching and is still on tour for “The Refugee Ocean,” which, according to the publisher, is about “two refugees who find that their lives are inextricably linked-over time and distance-by the perils of history and a single haunting piece of music.” For Toutonghi, the book was challenging to write and felt different from his previous more comedic books. “This one is a lot darker, a lot more serious,” Toutonghi said.
For all budding writers out there in the Garfield community, “Pitch stories constantly,” Toutonghi said, “get something published somewhere and then [you have] a bio,” something you can use in future pitches to make them stronger. In other words, be curious and inquisitive, never give up, and find ways to share your art with the world.
