PICK SOMETHING YOU LOVE...

When I was a planner's wife, I used to tell other city planners who we networked with that I wanted to be a PR person for the Mississippi Planning Association. I was 20 years old at the time; doe-eyed, eternally optimistic, and infatuated with preserving Mississippi's history and culture.

I saw community planning, historic preservation, and economic development as the keys to making that happen.

As time went by, I began to see journalism as a more practical way to achieve some of my goals. Or at least a more practical way to get a paid-for diploma.

Yet, through the study of jouranlism, I've discovered ways to tighten my writing (my first love) and gained the confidence that I really could do anything that I wanted in life.

Along the way, I discovered yet another way to marry my love for journalism and teaching and promoting Mississippi history and culture: Hitchhike, the Mississippi travel magazine for armchair anthropologists, that I conceived in Dr. Husni's Magazine class.


So when Roger Stolle of Cat Head record shop in Clarksdale, Miss., visited last week to share with journalism students how he used his 13 year marketing experience to revitalize the Mississippi blues industry, using his music shop as a base for his two-fold mission of promoting from within, I was ecstatic.

Besides the store, Stolle has also produced a documentary: M for Mississippi, that features

days with 12 obscure Mississippi blues artists in their element.

The Cat Head mission has two parts: promote from within by exporting a product, like the documentary and import something at the same time (bringing people in) with the product.

To justify his risky endeavor, coming to one of the poorest regions in the country to try to build a business from the ground up, Stolle offers this to the next generation of journalists or potential PR representatives:

"I thought I was young enough that if I failed, I could still do something else," Stolle said. Granted, sometimes it's hard to "follow your dreams, at all costs". But sometimes, you can't afford not to.