Welcome to the beer, Buddhas, birds, buses — and beyond newsletter!

If you signed up to get these periodic notes from me, you can be sure that you are a special person in my life and I appreciate you! Thank you! Leave it to me to wait this long to send my first email about what I’m up to on the freelance front. I’ll endeavor to swing by your inbox more often in the future.

I’ve been at this freelance thing for over a year now, and am happy to report that I’ve got my sea legs for this wild new career voyage! In a nutshell, I’ve signed contracts with 10 publications, and growing! I continue to seek opportunities to write more narratively about people and places, those “storytelling” stories.

Grateful that I get to keep working alongside my talented husband Craig Kohlruss, and looking forward to sharing our latest collaboration soon! Craig continues to do freelance photography on top of his staff job as a Fresno Bee photojournalist. All the stellar photos in this newsletter were made by him!

I love how freelancing empowers me to pursue a diverse array of ever-growing ideas with stalwart determination. A couple of my favorite tales came out of an epic road trip that Craig and I took around the West.

• This story about my favorite beer for Good Beer Hunting — blending first-person narrative writing and traditional news reporting — is the closest to what I’m most interested in doing more of.

It brings me back to a career highlight, writing a features column, “Heart in the San Joaquin,” at The Fresno Bee that won a Best of the West in its first year. Then I was tapped for more straight news reporting as newsroom resources shrank. Resigning to freelance let me use my own voice again. And it fulfilled a longtime dream: I wanted to freelance since my first days in journalism school!

• Plus this culture story and profile — 1,000 Buddhas on a Native American Reservation — for Tricycle magazine is a good example of another writing style that I love, just featuring something amazing without personal reflections from me. It’s stacked with gorgeous photos by Craig that are so OMG!

Beyond those beer and Buddha tales, my pitches led to a Prism Reports story about an exchange student in limbo after her parents were killed in an earthquake, a Sierra magazine story about a construction boom in Yosemite National Park, and a birder/conservation movement profile for Audubon magazine.

Many publications rely on freelance writers for a good chunk of their stories, allotting a portion of their budgets to pay for this work. Editors ask for “pitches,” story ideas that they then assign, or not! Overall, these editors don’t accept manuscripts out of the blue (an exception can be some personal essays/opinion pieces etc.) and they are part of a story’s creation from the start.

My work, thankfully, also comes from editors pitching me! Some great requests from editors led to this travelogue about riding the train and bus to Yosemite, and this Q&A with a “Yellowstone” + “1883” star. I’ve been happy to say yes to less glamorous assignments, too, staying open to pretty much everything — although I couldn’t bring myself to say yes to a request from one national news organization to write about crime!

I hope to focus more on what I’m most passionate about. I’m especially into storytelling that connects people and initiates exploration. I’ve worked as a journalist for the past 15 years because I love helping share your stories. Our stories help us better understand and care about each other.

You can read more of my favorites in my portfolio, carmenkohlruss.com.

If you are interested in what I'm doing and in my corner, so to speak, you have no idea how precious to me that you are! The public and unusual nature of having a job like this can amplify the pressure I already put on myself. *That ideal story* still evades me — but I’m headed in the right direction! And that is a good feeling.

Thanks for reading and for living lives that inspire me to write! Here's to the future!

With love and gratitude,

Carmen Kohlruss