{"id":24071,"date":"2023-03-29T14:27:26","date_gmt":"2023-03-29T18:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=24071"},"modified":"2024-03-26T16:09:25","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T20:09:25","slug":"as-he-tells-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/as-he-tells-it\/","title":{"rendered":"As He Tells It"},"content":{"rendered":"

The life of journalist Peter Gwin ’88 is one of pirates and fixers and brushes with everyday humanity.<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

The stories were his portal, his magic carpet, a trap door that opened to reveal the whole world. So, it\u2019s not hard to understand how writing similar stories became his dream, the motivation for so many choices he would make: A road trip with friends was a chance to send dispatches back to his prove he could make it in another country. And since the magazine that he hoped would one day hire him was based in Washington, D.C., that\u2019s where Peter Gwin would be based, too.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe dream was always to go to National Geographic,\u201d says Gwin, who\u2019s been under the spell of the iconic jonquil-yellow frame since his grandfather gave him a subscription as a kid.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The magic is sustained by the human urge to know. \u201cIt\u2019s a basic human impulse \u2013 we want to see what\u2019s out there,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve always had an insatiable appetite for it.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The dream became reality in 2003. Today, Gwin is an editor at large for National Geographic and<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>co-host of the award-winning \u201cOverheard\u201d podcast.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"two

In 2010, while searching for kung fu masters in the Song Mountains of Hennan province, Gwin encounters Fan Fuzhong, who traces his kung fu lineage to Shaolin Temple monks. \/ Fritz Hoffmann<\/p><\/div>\n

DISPATCHES<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His favorite class his first year at Furman was first-year composition. He wanted no<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>part of Shakespeare but knew he\u2019d never get an English degree without the bard. English<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>professor John Crabtree, who died in 2019 at age 93, \u201cturned out to be one of the best<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>teachers I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d Gwin says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Crabtree brought the old words to life in a way that \u201cyou could see what everyone was<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>raving about,\u201d he says. The class was foundational to his \u201cappreciation for the language,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>a way to think about text.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gwin wrote for The Paladin and was editor of The Echo, a student poetry journal that<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>he helped expand into a full literary magazine.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After graduation, Gwin and four friends piled into a Nissan Pathfinder pulling a borrowed pop-up camper and hit 36 states in two months before the military and careers and graduate school took them separate ways.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gwin sent accounts of the trip to This Week in Peachtree City, his hometown newspaper, writing about breaking down in Wyoming and meeting a group of road-tripping young women at the Statue of Liberty.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His parents would get stopped at the grocery store by shoppers wondering where the guys were going next.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThat really fired me up,\u201d Gwin says. He taught English in Botswana for Harvard\u2019s World Teach program then hitchhiked across Africa and wrote another series of dispatches, this time faxing them confidently to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But he returned to Georgia to learn not one had been published. The editor told him the stories sounded more like magazine journalism.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to imagine criticism that would have been sweeter to his ears. Gwin considers that period<\/span> excellent practice. He learned how to begin conversations, to ask questions, to manage logistics in a foreign country.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He learned how little he knew.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you travel, you realize pretty quickly that places are very often far different than you imagined,\u201d he says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"two

Gwin in Timbuktu \/ National Geographic<\/p><\/div>\n

REJECTION<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gwin moved to D.C. and was waiting tables when he got wind of a job writing scripts for educational film strips for National Geographic.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t care,\u201d he decided. \u201cIt\u2019s a writing job, inside Geographic. I will work my way from the film<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>strip department to inside the yellow border.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He sent a r\u00e9sum\u00e9, but his dad said that would never be enough: Go down there, look them in the eye, shake hands, he advised.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A friend who worked in the photo department got him into the building but the person responsible for hiring was unpleasantly surprised to find Gwin in her office. As he made his pitch, she picked up her phone and reported an intruder on the floor.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, I was like, \u2018Holy crap! There\u2019s an intruder?\u2019 I had no idea she meant me,\u201d Gwin says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the truth hit him, he left at a run and escaped to a nearby bar, sweating like a fugitive. It<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>would be almost a decade before he entered the building again.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, he took a job with Europe Magazine.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For nine years he covered topics such as the transition from the Common Market to the European Union, learning as he wrote how to help readers understand a complicated world. But he never stopped\u00a0 watching the job postings from National Geographic. And the second time he applied, no one called security.<\/p>\n

\"man

Gwin relaxes in the Alaska Western Arctic. \/ National Geographic<\/p><\/div>\n

PEOPLE<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Please don\u2019t ask his favorite story. It\u2019s an impossible question for someone who has written about pirates in the Malacca Straits, traditional Chinese medicine, and rhinoceros poaching.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really stays with me are the people that you experience the reporting with,\u201d Gwin says,<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>recalling a game ranger in South Africa and a fixer in China, where he was reporting on aging kung fu master.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A fixer is almost always the unsung hero of a story, \u201cthe person who gets you into this world that you\u2019re completely unfamiliar with and in many ways unprepared for,\u201d he says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gwin stayed multiple times with the family of his fixer in Timbuktu. When Gwin was writing about sensitive subjects, including terrorism and black-market smuggling, the man\u2019s 12-year-old nephew often led him safely through the labyrinth of the city at night.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMany sources didn\u2019t want to be seen talking to a foreigner, so I\u2019d visit after dark wearing a turban covering my face like a lot of the population in Timbuktu,\u201d he says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These kinds of experiences are as important to the stories as the interviews.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI come back with this richer sense of being part of humanity,\u201d he says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

PODCAST<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the office, every conversation, from elevator chitchat to a formal meeting, is liable to turn into a fabulous story.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNever get into a storytelling contest with photographers,\u201d Gwin says. \u201cNever do it.\u201d He was on assignment with one photographer friend who told him about covering Yasser Arafat\u2019s funeral. The crowd had surged and pushed Gwin\u2019s friend into the Palestinian leader\u2019s grave.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Stories like that don\u2019t typically end up in the magazine, but they\u2019re a regular part of Geographic life. Gwin recognized their parallel power to connect with listeners eager to understand the world.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOverheard,\u201d which began in 2019, deepens listeners\u2019 connection to both the publication and the world of exploration. Gwin and his co-host Amy Briggs open the door on conversations such as \u201chow to investigate an ancient pharaoh\u2019s murder or how to set up a camera trap for a Himalayan snow leopard.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s the exact kind of portal that drew him in all those years ago. \u201cThe thing that makes human<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>beings different from other species is the thing that drives us to see what\u2019s the next hill over,\u201d Gwin says.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGeographic is really just tapping into that thing that\u2019s inside all of us \u2013 to go see.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The life of journalist Peter Gwin \u201988 is one of pirates and fixers and brushes with everyday humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":272,"featured_media":25836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1967,1963,1964],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-furman-magazine","category-spring-2023"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/272"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}