I spent a very miserable year as a middle-school English teacher in South Mississippi the year after I graduated from college. It was miserable for a lot of reasons: the chronic underfunding of Mississippi public schools, for example, and the fact that I was bizarrely expected to keep my class quiet at lunch time, the only time (I thought) that they should have been allowed to talk freely all day. But it was mostly miserable because I wasn’t writing and because I wasn’t living in Jackson.
In February of my first year, my then-boss asked me if I wanted to take a more active role in the leadership of the English department during the next school year. Unprofessionally, I replied, “Oh, I most definitely won’t be here next year.” I wasn’t: I moved back to Jackson and accepted a job at my alma mater as an enrollment verification specialist in the Registrar’s Office. Nate Schumann and I had been lab partners in high school, and he waited about three minutes after I moved back before asking me if I’d be interested in writing some columns and other articles for the Jackson Free Press, where he was an editor before he moved to the Mississippi Free Press as the two publications merged over time.
One year, Taylor Hathorn wrote the entire “Guys We Love” section of the Jackson Free Press, providing coverage of some of Jackson’s favorite men. Cover courtesy Jackson Free Press ” data-medium-file=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?fit=237%2C300&ssl=1″ data-large-file=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?fit=749%2C947&ssl=1″ src=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?resize=749%2C947&ssl=1″ alt class=”wp-image-212729″ srcset=”https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?w=749&ssl=1 749w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?resize=237%2C300&ssl=1 237w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?resize=400%2C506&ssl=1 400w, https://i0.wp.com/www.mississippifreepress.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Guys-We-Love-issue-2021.jpg?w=370&ssl=1 370w” sizes=”(max-width: 749px) 100vw, 749px”>One year, Taylor Hathorn wrote the entire “Guys We Love” section of the Jackson Free Press, providing coverage of some of Jackson’s favorite men. Cover courtesy Jackson Free Press
The pandemic had descended, and so I filled my non-working hours with phone interviews. One year, I wrote the entirety of the “Guys We Love” section; another, I wrote more than half of the Best of Jackson blurbs. Later, when the MFP acquired the JFP, I wrote articles for them,