Co-Founder’s Letter: Views From the Six

{Image Credit: iStock}

Dear Readers,

The sixth anniversary of our site is June 16, and there’s no better time than now to reflect upon what writing for this site has meant to me for the past six years.

After hearing about the initial idea from our Editor-in-Chief, Tania, I joined The Hudsucker in 2012 without really knowing what I was agreeing to. All I knew was that I liked to write and had opinions that I felt needed to be heard. That philosophy would become the basis of my longest running series of articles reviewing episodes of the American Idol franchise, which I’ve been doing since Season 12. For me, these reviews became a way to help me air my grievances and share my excitement with readers of our site. Idol is, after all, a show about opinions, whether of the judges or America at large, so it made sense to want to have mine heard in some tangible way through this site.

My partner, Elliott, and I hanging out with Idol contestant Michael Sarver in Nashville during the summer of 2015 after interviewing him about his new album Begin Again.

My passion for all things Idol helped fuel my passion for writing. Ray Bradbury, author of the classic novel Fahrenheit 451, said, “Write what you love and love what you write,” and I was doing just that.

Writing for The Hudsucker opened the path for me to express my love of music by writing reviews for Idol winners albums like Lee DeWyze and Trent Harmon only to have them tell me they read and loved my reviews when I met them in person. It gave me a chance to interview fascinating personalities like So You Think You Can Dance contestant Kent Boyd and his co-star Rose Marziale as well as American Idol contestant Michael Sarver, who I later spent time hanging out with in Nashville. It also let me write about my travels to places like New York during the holidays or New Orleans during football pre-season. These were all experiences that I wanted to share with our readers so they could have them too. After all, life is about sharing the best experiences with other people.

I will confess that not every article I wrote for this site was written several days in advance. Sometimes it was scribbled on a napkin and typed furiously into my computer the day of publishing, but what I found was that when I went back and looked at my earlier work compared to now, my prose and writing style had improved in ways I never noticed or thought it would. The old cliche was true — practice makes perfect — and I was proud of what I had written. With this knowledge in hand, I even took my hobby a step further and wrote a novel this past November as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which I’m currently in the process of editing. It was something I never thought I’d be able to do because of how much of a perfectionist I am, but writing for The Hudsucker gave me confidence in my writing.

All this is to say that The Hudsucker has, in its own way, inspired me. It has bolstered my self-esteem, given me new ideas and created friendships. It has also sparked great conversations and opened my mind as well. Once of the small joys of writing for our site has been brainstorming a new piece only to find one of our other writers wrote something similar. Often, I find that they bring a fresh take to the story that I would not have thought of, like Elizabeth The’s piece on Idol winner David Cook. These articles can also remind me that in a world fraught with differences, we actually all have more in common than we know, like Katherine Hernandez’s New Years Resolution article.

This has always been one of the goals of our site: to be a place where people can come during their lunch break or morning commute and think about the lighter things in life, whether it be those new drinks from Starbucks or the latest episode of their favorite television show.

To write for a site that aims to make people’s day better, easier, and more thought-provoking is really why the past six years have been so rewarding for me, and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for myself as a writer and for The Hudsucker. Cheers to the past six years!

Sincerely,

Andrew Rogers
Co-Founder and Senior Writer, The Hudsucker

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