As a kid, KELLI ANDERSON dreamed of being a cartoonist. That made her a natural choice to profile syndicated 'toon artist Hilary Price. "It turned out Hilary always wanted to be a writer," says Anderson, '84, who lives in Sonoma, Calif. "We were eager to ask each other a lot of questions." As a journalist, Anderson has made a career of being inquisitive. Since 1989 she's been a writer for Sports Illustrated. Earlier this year she took a leave from SI to help relaunch Sports Illustrated for Women. "I'm in it more for the writing than for the sports," she says. "It's as good a genre as there is for creating drama."
Not many magazine writers submit their articles with an annotated appendix. But BERNARD BUTCHER, '64, MA '95, isn't your average scribe. His 25-year banking career made him a fanatic for detail. After selling his firm to a Dutch bank in 1994, Butcher returned to Stanford for a master's degree in history. "Anybody who has a chance to go back to college at 50 is very lucky," he says. Since 1996 he's been teaching at a girls' prep school in San Francisco. His story on the intricate deal that brought the Soviet Communist Party archives to the Hoover Institution is his third for Stanford. "The challenge," he says, "was finding a story line that would capture the imagination -- and then sneaking in the historical significance."
As it happens, photographer AMANDA LANE has a thing for Ming dynasty furniture. So when she walked into novelist Vikram Seth's West London flat, she knew they had something in common. "He won an award, and instead of spending the money on a car or something, he decided to buy a chair and desk," says Lane, 32, who lives in East London. Her portrait of Seth in his centuries-old chair captures his contemplative side. Since earning a master's degree from the Royal College of Arts in 1994, Lane has specialized in the nearly lost techniques of 19th-century printmaking. Her photographs have appeared in Vogue and the Sunday Times of London.
Hard at work on a rewrite of his latest article, ADAM STRASSBERG was feeling more than the usual pressure. His wife was due to go into labor any day. "I had to get the whole rewrite done before the baby came," he says. "It was a tougher deadline than usual." Strassberg, MD '99, finished revising his account of his night as a paramedic in time to assist in the March 3 birth of Zachary. That experience will undoubtedly lead to another "mythopoetic familiar essay" -- a form Strassberg, 30, has been fiddling with since he began writing as a senior at Harvard. He starts a psychiatry residency at Stanford this summer. Eventually he hopes to combine careers as a writer and physician.
