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While striving to become a travel writer in the years after Watergate, Thomas Swick discovered that although writing for a newspaper was educational, there was more to be learned through romance with a foreigner. Thomas Swick Longreads July 19 minutes 4, words. In the fall of I returned home to New Jersey after a year in France.
I had been pursuing my dream of becoming a travel writer by studying French in Aix-en-Provence and working on a farm in Kutzenhausen, Alsace. Now I needed a byline, preferably a steady one. Making the rounds of newspaper offices, I stopped one day at the two-story brick building of the Trenton Times.
There seemed little reason to play it straight. A few days later I got a call from the features editor asking me to come in for an interview β my reward for being original, and knowing my audience, or at least guessing at it correctly. I drove the river road south from Phillipsburg, where I was then living with my parents, back to Trenton.
