To the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away

Stephanie Salter, the former Chroniclecolumnist, is speaking from her new dateline, 2,000 miles east of her old one -- or, better yet, half a country to the right. "It's going to be interesting," says Salter, who in San Francisco was invariably described (with a sigh or a sneer, depending on which blog you wrote for) as the op-ed page's lone, keening voice for the left. "Indiana was one of the first red states up there for Bush. But this town's not without its liberals. It's Eugene Debs' birthplace. His house is still standing, in fact. And Terre Haute's always been a pretty good union town." She pauses. "It could be worse."

Last we saw of Salter, she was standing outside the Chroniclebuilding at a protest rally in her honor, wiping away tears as a crowd of loyal readers urged the paper, which had recently killed her long-running column, to reconsider -- a rare sight at a newspaper unless some editor happens to spike Zippy. Today, two years later, after nearly three decades in San Francisco, Salter is back in her hometown, a native daughter in her 50s who seems more than a little out of place. She lives four minutes from her mother's home, pays $375 a month to rent a carriage house, and now writes a metro column, among other things, for a 34,000-circulation paper, the Tribune Star. "It's good to be home again in Terre Haute," read the headline over her second column, which ran on Friday. (Her first: "Be thankful that you didn't have to wrestle California ballot.") At the paper, Salter hopes to write about "Hoosier things," she says. "Cultural things, philosophical. No hard politics. What I can do, they want to do."

The move wasn't exactly planned. Last May, her father, Morris, was diagnosed with lung cancer; he would die a few months later. Salter, writing mostly features for the Chronicleat that point, left for home with a one-way ticket and a single carry-on bag. "As summer wore on," she says, "I just slowly began to realize it was time to move back here." Four months later, she returned to San Francisco and quit her job. At Salter's request, the farewell party was held in the paper's composing room, once the buffer between the Chronicle and the Examiner when the two papers shared the building and a symbol of a not-too-distant era of San Francisco journalism.

"It seemed appropriate to have the goodbye there. It's kind of in shambles now," says Salter, who got her start in town at the Hearst-owned Examiner, first as a reporter and later as a columnist. "Very appropriate." (As a going-away gift, Bad Reporter cartoonist Don Asmussen gave Salter a personalized comic, depicting her on the left-most edge of the Earth, getting picked off by a meteor. "My politics are so left," Salter says, laughing as she recounts the joke, "that I got hit by a meteor that missed the Earth. All I say is, 'Ow.'")

Salter is cautious when the topic turns to the Chronicle -- so cautious, in fact, that she asked Dog Bites not to say she was being cautious. That's not surprising: Her demotion from the op-ed page, which reportedly drew more than 1,200 angry reader e-mails, was marked by a surprising amount of open hostility, not least because of the more conspiracy-minded media watchers in San Francisco. In Salter's exile, they found proof that the Chronicle couldn't handle her progressive politics, that the editors wanted a more palatable op-ed page for all those suburban readers picking up the paper from their manicured lawns, that then-Publisher John Oppedahl just flat hated feminists. Of course, all these theories overlooked a simple possibility: Maybe the column, as all columns do in time, had played out its string.

"Obviously, it got real difficult for me when my column was taken away," Salter says. "But I found some wonderful safe harbors after that [in the paper's Insight and Living sections]. They gave me a wonderful place to heal."

She insists that her departure had nothing to do with the strife over her column, and that she doesn't want to "burn any bridges, or bomb and strafe anybody." She adds: "After all the years of threatening to quit over this thing or that thing, leaving had nothing to do with being unhappy. It really didn't. It was all about the family, going where I needed to go."

For now, there are some loose ends. She is finishing up a feature for the Chronicle about going home and dealing with her father's illness. And she still has a house in San Francisco, now being rented. "Everything I own is in San Francisco," Salter says, and she has no plan to clear out entirely. "Unless some terrible reversal of fortune hits, I plan to hold onto my piece of San Francisco real estate for as long as I live." (Tommy Craggs)

Once we started to notice them, they were everywhere, tucked in the corners of coffee shops with their laptops, scribbling their way through notebooks on the bus. We puzzled awhile, then found the explanation: National Novel Writing Month. This yearly event is the brainchild of occasional SF Weeklycontributor Chris Baty, who has seen his beloved NaNoWriMo (as it is often truncated) blossom into a full-fledged, international literary movement since its beginning in 1999. This year about 40,000 aspirants from around the globe have answered Baty's call to write a 50,000-word novel -- that is, about 125 pages -- in a single month. Of that army of scribes, a platoon of nearly 300 NaNos (as participants call themselves) claim residence in San Francisco. Some of their working titles: When Trannys Attack, Deadly Obsession, and Chucky B Fucks a Leg. But if the past is any indicator, less than 10 percent of them will reach the 50K mark.