Stacy Chandler Interview
Stacy Chandler is an assistant editor at No Depression. After working for a variety of daily newspapers for a decade, she began working for the magazine in 2013. These days, the magazine is "fully remote,” explains Stacy. “So I [work] from a little home office in Raleigh, usually directly supervised by my dog, Sabine.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
I definitely took an indirect route! I worked as a news copy editor at various daily newspapers for a decade until I was finally laid off in 2010, when I was seven months pregnant. Once my daughter was born, I started taking freelance gigs here and there. I was looking for editing work, but sometimes writing gigs came along, and in those days I was saying “yes” to everything. In 2013, No Depression mentioned in an email newsletter they were looking for someone for a temporary gig editing that newsletter and doing some social media work. I’d been a subscriber almost since the magazine’s beginning, so I jumped at the chance and was delighted to get hired. Temporary turned into … well, it’s been 10 years now. My job has expanded and evolved in that time: Now I plan and write that newsletter, in addition to many other duties as assistant editor. Basically, I’m in charge of the reviews, columns, and stories on nodepression.com, I copy edit our print journal, and I write stories of my own for both platforms.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?