By Manny Frishberg , JTNews Correspondent
David Volk is a funny man. He would like you to know just how funny, but it’s hard to get humor published these days. So, being a freelance writer with an obligation to help put food on the table, he has to settle for being known as a traveling man — or more precisely, a travel and food writer.
Not that he insists on getting paid for everything he writes. On the contrary. One of the least well-kept secrets about being a writer, after all, is that we want to be read. Which is why David sends out a regular series of “rants” to a select but ever growing list of email addresses – sort of a “blog” gone to weed. And some of those can be very funny, indeed.
The rants grew out of the weekly memos he sent out to remind people at the Stroum Jewish Community Center to turn their class listings in on time.
“I was having trouble getting people to give me material that they wanted publicized for programs, and they would not respond. Then I decided, let’s do it with humor.”
They have metamorphosed over the years into an Internet-driven series of humorous commentaries covering pretty much whatever he wants. That what he wants so often involves politics these days surprises the avidly apolitical Volk.
“I write about things that amuse me or irritate me or just that I think are funny,” he said. “I usually try to take something outrageous and turn it on its head. It’s really hard to write about politics these days because it’s funny, but not in a good way.”
David Volk was a familiar name — at least to readers of the Jewish Transcript — for years before he took on the job of publications coordinator at the JCC. As a freelancer, he had been a regular contributor to Washington’s Jewish newspaper. Among the famous and celebrated people that he interviewed to profile for the Transcript were CNN correspondent (now anchor), Wolf Blitzer, Holocaust survivor and author Elie Weisel and the Bridge brothers — not as widely renowned, but still famous in the Puget Sound Jewish community.
As a correspondent for the Transcript, KPLU (the public radio station based outside of Tacoma), the Capitol Hill Times and Beacon Hill’s community newspaper, he covered the gathering of neo-Nazis at Hayden Lake, Idaho for the 100th-year anniversary of Hitler’s birth. To get there, he traveled on a bus full of protesters, chartered by the Freedom Socialist Party.
Volk grew up in Fort Myers, Fla., in what he described as a “very small Jewish community” — his parents had to make a three-hour drive to stock up on kosher meat. He left when he was 19, he said, quoting Jake Johannson’s saying “It took that long to realize I was free to go.”
After college at the University of Missouri and a stint on a daily newspaper in Kansas City, he moved west, landing in Seattle about 15 years ago, to embark on a freelance writing career.
“My first internship, people kept telling me, ‘Don’t go into journalism. You’re going to be poor the rest of your life.’ But, if you think that’s bad, they would have just laughed at me if I’d said, ‘Oh, I’m going to become a freelance writer.’”
For a long time, he admitted, putting “freelance writer” on his résumé was a polite way of saying “unemployed.”
“I never intended to do it. It’s a weird way to make a living. You come up with ideas and then you just keep selling them. It’s a hard way to make a living but it can be fun,” he explained. “It was so much more exciting than working on a newspaper on a beat,” he said. “In the first six months as a freelance writer, I was in the tug-boat races, I was writing about Capitol Hill, I did a lot of writing for the Transcript.
“I was doing stories about the guys who own the vintage sports-clothing store, Ebbett’s Field Flannels. I did a two- or three-part story on Jewish homelessness — that was really interesting.”
Volk began specializing in finding off-beat angles to write about community events and activities that were a staple of community journalism, like the Sea-Fair table tennis tournament.
He also ended up writing about a doctor’s adventures as an official International Olympic urine-tester for Sports Northwest magazine shortly before the start of the Goodwill Games in Seattle.
Today his specialty is travel writing, another area he began moving into during his time as a Transcript writer.
“When I traveled, in fact, I was doing a lot of hanging out in Jewish communities in all sorts of places. There’s the Jewish Museum in Sydney, Australia, which is very interesting because most of the Jews who were original settlers of Australia were criminals — because it was a penal colony. The great thing about going through that museum is it’s like going through your family tree and finding the crooked branches,” said Volk.
“I was in Bangkok and I came across a Chabad House. While I was waiting in line for a telephone, a guy came up to me and said, ‘Are you doing anything?’ I said, ‘You need me for a minyan, don’t you?’”
He went on to join a Passover seder in Singapore.
Volk is also the author of two books: Fresh American Bananas, a compilation of adventures and travails traveling through the inner and outer worlds of David Volk, and the forthcoming The Tribe Has Spoken, a collection of what Volk describes as “the everyday wisdom and common sense you can learn from reality television,” due out in the fall.
“The hard part was watching hours and hours and hours of reality television,” he admitted. And what did David Volk learn form all those hours reviewing tapes?
“‘Queer Eye’ gets a thumbs-up,” he pronounced, “as does, I’m surprised to say, ‘The Osbornes.’”
To learn more about David Volk, including reading some of his rants or a sample chapter of Fresh American Bananas, visit his Web site: www.davidvolk.com