When I took a position at The Salt Lake Tribune in 1993, I unknowingly became the first Black reporter ever hired in its 122-year history. An essay that shares the title of this Substack was an award-winner in the Tara L. Masih Intercultural Essay Prize in 2010, a division of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and was later anthologized in The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize-Winning Essays.
As a former legacy media reporter for newspapers in SLC, Tulsa, St. Louis, and San Diego, I was almost always the only or one of a few Black men writing for these white-owned corporations. Face it, most corporations in this country are white-owned. The idealist journalist thought he was fighting democracy’s good fight with the light of news articles. I felt confident articles could change the world.
One day, long before I resigned from The San Diego Union-Tribune, the most disappointing of all my newspapers, I sat in Balboa Park with another Tribune refugee, musing about the wonderful, crazy experiences I had there as a Black person.
“A Dash of Pepper in the Snow,” my friend said. “When you write about Utah, that’s what you should call it.” I’ve published three long-form essays about the Utah experience and have other things planned.
A dash of pepper in the snow stands out in its setting but is also at risk of dissolving in its surroundings.
You’ll find my musings on pop culture, recipes, books, travel, cultural observations, and the writing life. I’ve published essays in literary magazines, print collections, and general circulation publications for the last fifteen years.
Had not the newspaper business imploded; my dream would have been to become a columnist at a larger metropolitan daily; my favorite columnists function like modern-day essayists.
You’ll find a decade’s worth of food and travel photos on my Instagram feed from Europe, North Africa, and North and South America. All in all, I’m approaching 30 countries.
You can read more about my writing journey, from journalism to nonfiction. I’m currently writing experimental essays and learning the art of fiction and screenwriting at www.samuelautman.com.
Now that Twitter has imploded, and Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are simply feeding our data in Meta’s advertising algorithms, I'm shifting to Bluesky and Substack to find community.
