Sitting there stunned, listening to the Diana K. Sugg preaching a virtuouso Sunday sermon about finding journalistic salvation, that's what I kept asking my good buddy Erin Sullivan.
She is going to levitate, right? That's what I expected, for Diana Sugg to rise like the old TV Superman, go flying just over our heads like Cathy Rigby, and whoosh out the double door, with Clark Kent somehow missing the whole darn thing.
In three years of Nieman, it was the single-most inspiring and affecting session I've attended. This was not a woman coming in with a list of talking points and a rush to the Q&A. This was a woman with a message to deliver, a woman who had seen the light and desired greatly to fill us with the spirit she'd found one night while staring at herself in the mirror at the Baltimore Sun.
"Go the distance," is what she said she heard that night, like her own little karmic chant, like a spirit whispering to her. "Go the distance."
I would have gone any distance for Diana K. Sugg after that soul stirring.
She lifted us up. Then she tugged us down to that place we all want readers to go, to the place in the soul where their humanity is most tender, by going through the pictures and words that made up her Baltimore Sun series, If I Die.
I'm sitting there crying. The woman on my left starts crying.
Then she started taking us back up, leading us to the promised land, back to soul's salvation.
Diana said she grew up Irish-Catholic, but, I swear, this lapsed Southern Baptist boy had never been so ready to walk the aisle and get dunked in blessed water.
Can’t wait to get the MP3s, if only to hear it all over again, like some Deadhead desperate to relive the third DC ’91 show all over again.
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