Off the Press: A Talk with Jeff Kelly

 

When you write for a newspaper, you got to be able to know about your town. As someone who writes about the area, it’s kind of a good idea. Jeff Kelly knows all about this: he was once a writer for the Boston Globe. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill writer doing the news or some sort of politics, which he was very adamant about as we talked in a rather crowded library.

“I really hate politics,” Jeff told me “And newspapers were just starting to get more and more political.”

Jeff, now an adjunct professor of creative writing at Endicott College, wrote non-fiction stories for the Globe while he lived in Cambridge. He had also done some work with the Boston Magazine. His favorite piece of work for them revolved around women police officers in Boston. He went out with two female detectives that who had been doing some undercover work. Jeff’s fondest moment was sitting in a little diner with them at the end of the night and asking how they learned to use their guns. The more athletically built one gave a generic answer by saying the academy. As for the other officer, she was ironically smaller than the other detective and said “Jeff, I’m from Mississippi. If you’re a girl born in Mississippi, you know how to shoot a gun.”

As a published children’s author, Jeff takes pride in the fact that all his non-fiction stories are based off of real events. It has been his specialty for many years and it is something that he encourages in each one of his classes. He still admires when his students are able to write fiction, but to Jeff, there is something deep and meaningful in writing about what has happened.

“I’ve always had a problem writing from other points of views,” he told me, which, as an English major, I was very quick to relate with him on “I always write best when I write about things that actually happened.”

Jeff then proceeded to pull a laminated story out of his bag. It was a story that he had written for the Globe about this one time that he was sitting on the T next to woman with pet rats. He made sure to point out the art that they had done to go along with his story. It was of a very muscular rat that was much larger than the rest of the people. He was sitting next to the woman and looked to be intimidating the rest of the people on the train. He found it so amusing how abstract and false the picture was. This was my way of transitioning as flawlessly as possible to Boston movies. More specifically, which ones were better: the realistic, more accurate movies or the movies that had some creative license to them?

“You know, I don’t know. It varies from movie to movie and it depends on what you’re setting out for when you make those movies. I really love the realistic movies like The Departed, though. I always liked that one scene where the cop is at the door trying to ask a woman some questions and then when she sees the mafia drive by, she slams the door. You know that she knows something. It’s a great movie and I think it does a great job depicting the Boston mafia.”

Our conversation became more and more interesting as we talked about just how segmented Boston was. There’s Chinatown, the Italian North End, a heavily Irish-filled Charlestown, and much more. Jeff pointed this out to me as he referred to Boston as “the most segmented city in America”. I knew he was right, but it made me curious then as to why so many of the movies ended up being about the Irish? Jeff wasn’t truly able to give a specific answer. As I thanked him and hurried along to my next class, we seemed to be that that was specifically a matter of whose been able to get their hands on a camera.