I first encountered The Stranger when I was in college and thinking of switching mid-stride to the University of Washington from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. I hated the desert, Nirvana and Pearl Jam were cresting, and I wanted to be somewhere with cooler cultural offerings than Rita Rudner and Siegfried and Roy. I visited Seattle during a dismal, rainy Christmas week with a friend, not knowing anyone or anything. It was the winter of ’92, and The Stranger was just a year old. I held its weird pages in my hand and thought that when I moved here, I would want to write for it.
I soon did. Daniel Housman, the paper’s first music editor, commissioned me to write about techno at a time when techno was sneered at (even more than it is now). It was my first professional writing gig, and I’ve been writing for a living ever since.