Kathryn and John Kirkland reflect on their 31 years telling stories at PSU

Written by Kurt Bedell

Over the course of a combined 62 years of service, Kathryn and John Kirkland have crafted and shaped countless stories of Portland State University people, programs and history for our broader PSU community to enjoy. And along the way, they’ve witnessed significant changes on the PSU campus and new ways that words, images and stories are produced and shared.

More than 100 issues and 31 years later, both Kathryn and John Kirkland are saying goodbye as they retire from Portland State University on August 30, 2019.

John started the couple’s association with Portland’s urban university in the spring of 1987 after Kathryn read a story in the Oregonian that PSU was starting a new alumni magazine. “You may want to just talk to their editor,” Kathryn told him at the time. John did, was hired as a freelancer and wrote stories for the magazine’s first couple of issues.

A few months later, the editor of Portland State Magazine decided to leave PSU. “She asked me if I knew anyone who’d be interested in the job,” John remembers. John did know somebody: Kathryn. She subsequently applied for the position and was hired that October.

Kathryn Kirkland official PSU staff photo, 1987

In her earliest days as editor of Portland State Magazine, Kathryn crafted copy on an electric memory typewriter that had a tiny screen displaying just one line of text at a time. “It had three pages of memory,” Kathryn remembers, “but you had to print out your document to see your mistakes and then find them on your one-line screen to fix them.”

Increasingly, however, computers were becoming more prevalent and Kathryn soon had one of her own to create the magazine. “My manager had one but didn’t like this new fangled thing, the computer,” Kathryn remembers, chuckling. “And so she gave me hers.”

Soon Kathryn was digitally assembling both the magazine and Currently — PSU’s newsletter for faculty and staff. “It was a big deal when we got a modem,” Kathryn remembers. “It was very noisy,” she remembers, recalling the gritty tones that dial-up modems made those days when connecting over the phone lines.

Over three decades, both Kathryn and John wrote and edited hundreds of stories for Portland State Magazine, Currently and scores of other news releases, speeches and stories used by the media. And both have fond memories of their favorites.

For John, it’s probably the story he wrote in the early 1990s about children’s literature that involved interviewing the book editor of the New York Times. Or his work with Mark Weislogel to cover the building and launching of weather balloons with engineering students to photograph the eclipse in 2018. Or his story on Darrell Grant, premier jazz musician and PSU music faculty member. Or perhaps chronicling Oregon’s racist history through the eyes of Darrell Millner, founding chair of Black Studies at PSU.

Curriculum Revolution cover, PSU Magazine, Fall 1994

Kathryn remembers two particular magazine covers. The first introduced a radical new approach to undergraduate general education with the University Studies program in 1994. Kathryn riffed on the revolutionary theme with lady liberty leading the French revolution on the cover. The second ran with a story in 1999 that chronicled the then-proposal to clean and drink water from the Willamette River. “The cover was a cartoon of a scientist underwater and it was really cute,” Kathryn remembers. “I had a lot of fun with covers over the years.”

Both revel at the sheer variety of stories found on a university campus and how that’s kept the work fresh and engaging all these years.

“It's just been so much fun,” reflects Kathryn. “And I have barely ever repeated a story in the magazine through my 31 years.”

John agrees. “At a university, there’s always something new and different to write about,” he says. “At a place like PSU, there’s always a huge variety of interesting stories to tell.”