"OK, this one seems a little weird, but.."
That was basically how I started my "pitch" to my many bosses on tonight's story. Not every story idea gets done, of course. There are only so many reporters and photographers available and only so many hours in the day and minutes in the newscasts. Every day we make decisions about what goes, what stays, what gets done another time and what just isn't going to get done at all.
That last category was what I was thinking this story would get dropped into. After all there were no political leaders in it, no yellow crime tape around it, no dramatic winter weather, no toll bridges, no traffic report, no real "news you can use" consumer value. Nobody was going to get mad and "Get Jesse" over it.
"So there's this college professor in Wenatchee who has written a novel. In Latin. He says it’s the first one of its kind published since 1754."
Silence.
That's a bit of a dramatization but the response was as you might expect, a bit tepid and puzzled. But my news director liked the idea (bless his heart) and said we should do it just maybe not today and not this month because it was November and things were pretty busy and lots of people were on vacation, etc. I thought that might be the end of it but it wasn't.
We finally made it happen. A few weeks ago photographer Jerry Hickey and I got a day to drive over the mountains to Wenatchee and interview Dr. Stephen Berard about his recently published novel. Written entirely in Latin. Not translated to it; written in it. He hopes it can help what he sees as a reawakening of the so-called "dead" language. It is a modern novel, a "Hyper-real" fantasy about a rather strange guy from Seattle who is an actor and dancer and has various adventures here and in Southern California in the movie world. It's not about Caesar or Perseus or ancient Mediterranean naval battles.
Berard wants Latin to live, for a new generation of readers. "The core is, it's in Latin and I want them to think of Latin as a literary language that can deal with modern society and modern topics."
He admits it isn't easy reading and he doesn't expect it to be a mainstream hit. But he does hope academics and people who love and study languages, especially old languages, will read it and enjoy it. Right now he says he knows he's gotten one royalty check so he believes he's sold some books but he doesn't know how many. Right now he's number 2 on the Amazon best-seller list for Latin books.
And right now everything in my news-world is completely back to normal. We're fighting a deadline and a time-restriction, Jerry's editing at hyper-speed while I make last-second changes and try to get the right names in the right places in the right scripts. The clock is ticking as it does every afternoon at this time. All for a story about a guy who wrote a book in Latin. The story itself, something of a wonderful news-miracle..
