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'Sun' columnist took long road to success
By Andrew Junker, ajunker@catholicsun.org
August 21, 2008
Distance can be a tricky thing to measure.
For instance, in some ways Chris Benguhe won’t have traveled very far when he gives a seminar at the Francisco Renewal Center Aug. 23. The St. Francis Xavier School and Brophy College Preparatory alum is a Phoenix native.
But in other, perhaps more meaningful ways, the road leading Benguhe to the place where he now stands — as a successful author and promoter of inspirational stories — is as long as they come.
That’s because not terribly long ago, Benguhe was employed as a “vendor of doom and gloom” in the tabloids. (His words.) How he came from that world to writing “Overcoming Life’s 7 Most Common Tragedies; Opportunities for Discovering God” and a column for The Catholic Sun is nothing short of providential, he said.
Benguhe’s writing career began as a fluke. The pre-med and biology student at Arizona State University was walking down the mall one day in Tempe when a dust storm blew a flyer into his face.
It was an advertisement for the yearly essay contest sponsored by the Society for Professional Journalists. The topic was “free speech,” and Benguhe, a self-admitted procrastinator, felt compelled to write an essay immediately.
In an hour, it was finished and sent into the society.
A few months later, he received a call informing him that he had won the contest. Benguhe went downtown to pick up his check and award in a bathing suit and tank top, not knowing that each year’s award recipient had to give a speech in front of local journalists and editors.
“I had to give this speech about how I wanted to be a writer, and I didn’t want to be a writer; I wanted to be a doctor,” Benguhe said. “But I started thinking about it and things started happening that day that I really can’t explain other than it was meant to be.”
He changed his major to English literature, graduated and landed a job as an editor — “I was in way over my head,” he said — with a local trade magazine.
But Benguhe wanted a job where he could rise through the ranks quickly, and something that was a little more exciting than copy-editing. So, he moved to Los Angeles and applied to any writing want ad he saw.
“I got this call back from a British-sounding guy who was very secretive. He told me he was from The National Enquirer and was interested in hiring me,” Benguhe said. “I had several auditions for the job, the first of which was following Farrah Fawcett around. That became my life, honestly, for about the next 10 years.”
Benguhe said the work was exciting for a young man in his 20s. He made good money, hobnobbed with celebrities and never suffered a dull moment. But these seemingly apparent benefits really just served to distract from the unease he felt at this lifestyle.
“I grew up Catholic. I believed my faith — but you feel so isolated there,” Benguhe said. “I really started questioning my identity and wondering if this was what life was all about.”
So, he tried to get out and started an independent magazine in Phoenix in 1996. While Benguhe was proud of the magazine, it suffered from money problems and folded shortly after its founding.
Benguhe needed employment and the tabloids were calling him back. This time he tried to mitigate their poisoning effects by accepting a position as a rewrite editor in Florida, away from Hollywood.
“But I was still in the thick of these stories,” he said. One of the first stories Benguhe had to work on when he went back to the tabloids was Princess Diana’s death.
And then, the shootings at Columbine High School happened in the spring of 1999. Journalists converged on the Colorado town, each trying to out-sensationalize the other.
“I really believe that was a turning point in American journalism,” Benguhe said. Before, he said, there was an unwritten rule that journalists would be more respectful and less harassing of “ordinary people.”
“You make excuses that the people you’re writing about are celebrities. They got what they bargained for,” he said. “But we would get right up in the faces of these parents who lost their children at Columbine and try to get them to blame the shooters’ parents or the media.”
It was a moment of clarity for Benguhe, and he knew he couldn’t go on making money off the misery of others.
Instead, he went back over his catalogue of unpublished stories. Many of them were about ordinary people who had overcome great hardship to lead inspiring lives. Of course, he said, they were usually too inspiring to make it into the tabloids.
He wrote a book about people acting compassionately and asked then-presidential candidate George W. Bush to write an introduction for it, which he did. Another book came, and another and another.
Until his most recent book, “Overcoming Life’s 7 Most Common Tragedies,” which shows people prevailing in difficult situations and being better for them, though they may not have realized it at the time.
Most of these people went through extremely difficult times in their lives and were made better by their experiences. They became stronger and more resolute in their faith, Benguhe said. “It made them say, no matter what, I’m going to stick up for what I believe.”
And in writing about these people and their stories, Benguhe began to realize something about himself and his vocation.
“There’s a saying that teachers teach what they need to learn and writers write what they need to read,” he said. “I was essentially writing a book that I needed to read. It told me how I needed to live my life.”
When he leads the seminar on tragedy and the opportunities it presents, Benguhe hopes that attendees can also take the book to heart and learn what he learned from his many wanderings.
“If I hadn’t done all that,” he said motioning to the past, “I wouldn’t be where I am.”
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