Mary T. Schmich is a hard woman to find. Based in the Tribune’s Atlanta bureau, she’s usually on the road, writing news features on the offbeat in the southeastern United States. Originally from the beautiful old seaport town of Savannah, Georgia, she speaks with a soft coastal drawl, and many of her statements end with the upward pitch of a question. Her accent has been only slightly affected by her years in other parts of the south, and not at all by her two years (1985 to 1987) spent writing feature stories in Chicago.
One of the strange things about writing it is that I’ve realized that there are all these intangible, corny-sounding aspects to writing a strip that is this old and that therefore has its own life–you cannot walk in and change everything about it. You’re walking into somebody else’s house, and you cannot rearrange all the furniture. Brenda is Brenda. I feel like Brenda has evolved since I’ve been writing her, but she’s still Brenda. She’s very independent of my wishes, and sometimes of my taste. I don’t know how to say it, but . . .
You know, it really sounds so stupid to talk about Brenda as though she’s a person? But she is. I continue to get to know her, and the better I get to know her, the more she becomes who I want her to be.
MTS: No. Until I wrote it, it absolutely had nothing to do with real-life newspapering. I think Brenda is a disturbingly accurate rendition of a newspaper right now.
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MTS: Yeah. It’s still farcical–every now and then I’ll still hear, thirdhand, that some newspaper person has complained that this isn’t how newsrooms are, this isn’t how reporters are; but in fact I think the most factual thing in the strip right now is the way the newsroom operates. It has a new editor that I created, named B. Babbitt Bottomline, whose whole mission in life is to make money and save money. Reporters fret about getting sent out to the suburbs. They fret over sexist photos and tacky headlines, and about all the prominence given media critics instead of investigative reporters. A lot of that stuff’s actually too esoteric for the average reader, I sometimes think. If you really know a newsroom, you know how accurate that stuff is. The way Brenda thinks about editors–believe me, these are things reporters think about editors!
BM: It seems to me that there have been more newspaper in-jokes in the strip–making “Pulitzer” the word that snaps Brenda in or out of a trance, for example.
