When your father runs the local paper, you learn early that nothing stays quiet in a small town. Secrets spread like dandelions, wind-blown and persistent. I spent my childhood knowing I couldn’t get away with anything. If I skipped school, my dad had it in print before I made it back home. If I passed a note in class, the teacher saved it “for the archives.” And if I dared sneak off to meet a boy at the lake, half the town knew before sundown.

Richard Maxx is a newspaperman through and through. Ink in his blood, headline in his voice. He can sniff out a story faster than a hound after a ham bone, and he’s got a moral compass sharp enough to cut steel. Growing up with him as my father meant being taught not just how to write a sentence, but how to ask a question that matters. I learned the difference between hearsay and truth before I lost my baby teeth.

That said, it wasn’t always easy. My teenage rebellion took the shape of sarcastic editorials slipped anonymously into the Journal’s submissions box. He always published them. Never asked if they were mine. Never had to.

Now, years later, I find myself sitting in his old office, surrounded by filing cabinets that groan with decades of town history. I help out part-time at the Whiskey Pines Journal, and if I’m honest, part of me wonders if the building missed me as much as I missed it. The walls are lined with yellowed headlines, photos of Fourth of July parades, obits that read like poetry, and more than a few front pages devoted to scandals that broke faster than the ice on the lake.

Working with my father as an adult is… different. There’s a quiet respect now that didn’t exist when I was sixteen and convinced he didn’t understand me. Turns out, he did. He just didn’t interrupt my learning curve. I see now that he knew I’d circle back. And here I am, notebook in hand, picking through the journal’s morgue for cold cases that still itch behind the town’s smiling facade.

Sometimes we fight. We argue over sentence structure, ethics, whether a source is credible. But there’s a rhythm to it, like old jazz musicians tuning up before a show. It’s not anger. It’s the shared language of people who know words matter.

I suppose the biggest confession is this: I thought I came home to lay low. To rest. To breathe. But the ink is in my blood, too. And there’s something deeply satisfying about shining a light into the cobwebbed corners of a town that would rather forget. My dad showed me how. And now, I do it in my own voice.

So if you see me around town, notebook tucked under one arm and that don’t-bother-me glare in my eyes, just know I’m probably not writing about you.

Probably.

Stay sharp, Roxie Maxx

Daughter of the Deadline, Editor by Instinct