Kate Walter was attending her high school reunion a few years ago when a former classmate produced an old copy of the student newspaper with an editorial Walter had written.
“The ideas in the piece weren’t sophisticated—I was only 16 or 17 and thinking like a teenager when I wrote it,” says Walter, a lecturer in developmental skills at BMCC as well as a highly regarded freelance writer. “But it was interesting to recognize my writer’s ‘voice’—it was already there.”
“Personal and profound”
Walter has spent a lifetime honing and refining that voice. In the New York Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest recently, she won third place for her contributions to the weekly newspaper, The Villager. The judges deemed her work “personal and profound—well-constructed columns that readers must find interesting.”
Walter had been an adjunct instructor at BMCC for 15 years when she hired on as a full-time faculty member this past January. For most of her adult life, she has earned her living as a freelance writer, publishing her work in all of New York’s major newspapers as well as numerous national magazines.
“I’ve always been torn between teaching and writing,” Walter says. “Actually, I started out as a high school English teacher, quit to become a full-time writer, and then returned to reaching as an adjunct at BMCC.” The offer to join the faculty full-time while continuing to write “was a dream opportunity,” she says.
Walter wasn’t prepared for her strong showing in the NYPA contest, given that her editor had submitted her columns without her knowledge. “I was glad not to know,” she says. “That way, I wasn’t nervous about my chances.” Among the columns that were entered was “Back in the Pew Again,” a reflection on the personal life changes that led her to resume regular church attendance after a hiatus of many years. Another column recaptured the jubilant mood in the West Village on Election Night last November—“a combination of journalism and personal reflection,” she says.
The art and craft of writing
As a writer, Walter has focused exclusively on nonfiction—profiles, interviews, personal essays and opinion pieces; she does not write fiction. But she is quick to note that writing personal essays is no less an art than a craft. “You have to know how to structure a sentence, how to cut and edit,” she says. “So I absolutely consider myself a craftsperson. But I am also an artist.”
In the classroom, Walter, who teaches courses in academic and critical reading and critical thinking, encourages her students to find their own writing voice and never attempts to impose her writing style on them. “I think my experience writing analytical, first-person essays is best used when I teach critical thinking,” she says. Not surprisingly, she has her students write as much as possible—“even if it’s not a writing class.”
