Hi. My name is Rich and I'm a tortured artist.

The Confession

Well, really, I'm more tortured, than artistic. And it may be argued that the artistic is more artifice than artful. But I try, nonetheless.

Folks who don't know me well (meaning just about everybody) don't realize I have this creative half that doesn't wield its powers in the company of friends and coworkers until long after we meet. In fact, not knowing myself as well as I ought, even I remained largely unaware of this need to create until the beast was unleashed during my final year of high school. My more "public" facing personna tends to be bookish, I suppose — and there's a good reason for that: I'm rarely without a book. Even in good company.

Not quite a misanthrope…

As long as I'm in the

So, Farris Hassan wants to be a journalist. More: he wants to be an immersion journalist, the kind of writer who fully enters the story he’s covering, risking becoming part of the story, and hoping to craft something fuller, with more texture, with greater narrative scope than traditional journalism. (Some traditional journalists are uncomfortable with immersive journalism because of the ethical issues raised in becoming part of the story. Recently, I blogged on Kurt Eichenwald’s story about teen pornographer Justin Berry, and Eichenwald crossed a fuzzy ethical line in traditional journalism by becoming part of and influencing the story itself, and he took some heat for it. But he did the right thing, and Eichenwald’s a big boy. He’s handling the criticism nicely.)

Problem is, Pine Crest private school student Farris Hassan is only