Author

Steve Chawkins

@schawkins

Steve Chawkins has been a writer and editor at newspapers in Colorado, New Mexico and California. He retired in 2015 after 21 years at the Los Angeles Times.

“He watched a mouse saunter up the electric cord leading to the nonfunctioning clock over the hotel bar and asked the Chinese waitress in German whether it was a tiger.”

This vivid, funny, terrific sentence could have been drawn from Lewis Carroll, but it’s from the middle of a deadline story on the frustrations of two “peace commissions” that were unable to keep…
March 1, 2017
The art of the obituary: It's a dying one

The art of the obituary: It’s a dying one

As newsrooms shrink, a former obit writer mourns the loss of bustling staffs that took deadline dives into fascinating lives, and looks fondly at the New York Times piece marking…
February 21, 2017