Author: Kelley

Plus ca change…

There’s an interesting conversation going on at Nicola’s blog about the concept of being a digital native vs. a digital immigrant — in other words, division along (and distance across) generational lines by whether or not one is “born to” a particular level of technology. Nicola cites an article that does a good job of dismantling that idea, or at least showing all the ways in which it’s reductive. And she posits in turn that this division isn’t about age, it’s about temperament. It’s about how each of us responds to change.

I think so too. There are so many ways that humans deal with change. We run away from it. Or we use it to run away — the abrupt and radical changes that take us away from problems, from fears, from love, from commitment, from the cages we’ve made out of our lives. Or maybe we “don’t believe” in change (news flash: it sure believes in us). Or we throw ourselves like lovers at the new thing because it’s part of our identity to be the person whose edge is always leading… We tackle it with plans and checklists, we wake up scared in the middle of the night, we celebrate it, we yearn for it.

And then we have to learn the new software at work, or we’re expected to navigate the hospital by following the colored lines on the floor, or the Syrian restaurant we really liked is just gone one day, and I stop and think You know, when I said all those brave words about change, this is not what I was talking about.

I think most of us are actually pretty good at stepping up to the seismic shifts in our world — we may not be graceful or happy about it, but on some level humans are built for it. I think it’s the thousand small daily changes that wear us down and do us in. And I’m coming to the reluctant conclusion that it happens to us all. I don’t want to stop learning, you know? Even if it means having to change in all the daily ways. When I stop being willing to do that, I don’t know if I’ll still be myself… I want to be one of those 90-year-old women with long gray hair and a fierce face who still updates her own website, even if by then we’re all managing content with our eyebrows or whatever…

I guess we’ll see.

(To find Nicola’s post about this, visit her blog and look for the entry “digital immigrant/digital native”. Would someone please tell MySpace to get with the permalinks?)

Interview: The Seventh Week

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers…

I taught Clarion West this past summer. A beautiful, inspiring, bone-tiring, heat-wave-in-Seattle experience in which I had the pleasure and privilege of working with some great writers.

The Seventh Week, the Clarion West newsletter, published a brief interview in their Spring 2007 issue. The interview was edited for length (I’m sure this surprises no one who has ever talked to me), but they graciously gave me permission to post the entire interview here.

The interview includes talk about why I write, and my advice to Clarion students (and by extension anyone who wants to learn to write).

Interview: Speculating Gender

I recently sat down with Jesse Vernon of Aqueduct Press for beer and conversation about Dangerous Space, Mars, and gender in life and fiction. I enjoyed it: I hope you will too.

Read the interview on the Aqueduct Press blog, and wander back this way if you’d like to talk more about it.

@U2 articles posted

I’m a stone U2 fan, and am fortunate to be part of the writing team at @U2, the world’s most popular U2 fan website. My work for @U2 includes personal essay, vehement opinion-spouting, articles, and an interview with a most interesting French-Italian author… On the horizon, another “Like A Song” essay in early 2008.

I’m proud to work with @U2 — the quality and passion of the writing, and the teamwork among the staff, are the flat-out best I’ve found in a volunteer or fan organization. You’ll find links to all my writing for @U2 on the Essays page. Enjoy.

Humans At Work

“So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.” — Peter Drucker

A few people have asked me about the consulting business I’m putting together, Humans At Work.

The company motto is Work is a human thing. Let’s treat each other that way. The core of the business is a training program that gives new managers a grounding in the essential skills of managing human beings.

Because Drucker is right. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least one horror story of a Manager From Hell — most of us have more than one. And it’s my experience that bad management happens not because people are evil or insane, but mostly because they have no idea how to be good managers. When we get our first management job, no one sits us down and tells us that the most important thing we can do to be successful is to deal well with the other humans in the building — to communicate clearly, build relationships that help everyone be more effective, share information, collaborate on decisions with the people whose work will be affected, and give people control of how they do their jobs. No one teaches us how to do these things. If we’re lucky as managers, we eventually figure out how to be better… generally at the expense of the people who work for us.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t. So I’m going to see if I can do something about it.

No one can learn to be a good manager in a classroom or a seminar — like writing or cooking or sex or conversation, or any of the other really fun stuff, being good takes practice. But it’s absolutely possible to point people in the right direction and give them basic tools and skills to help them start right. That’s what I plan to do with Humans At Work.

Managing is something I do well. I’ve been thinking about these ideas for 15 years. I have the skills and the passion for passing them along. I have notions for the training, and the business model, that I think will surprise people. We’ll see. The training curriculum is nearly done at the detail level, and I plan to start building the website in the beginning of the year.

This is not something I’ll ever give up writing for. If I’m doing it right — if I manage it well (grin) — I can help other people without having to lose myself.

So that’s what’s up. And I’d love to hear from you what you think good managers do, or don’t do, and what you wish your managers had known how to do better.

Welcome to the new digs

… which are pretty different from the old ones. I hope you enjoy the new look and structure. It’s meant to be more clear and more user-friendly. If it’s not, or if you find anything broken, please let me know at (contact at kelleyeskridge dot com).

And one of these days I’ll get a handy spambot-proof email link generator so that I don’t have to keep spelling out the addresses.

This blog takes the place of Virtual Pint, my former virtual space for reader interaction. It’ll take a while to transfer all those conversations over to this format — there are over a hundred questions/comments/responses spanning nearly five years — but they are still available here in the old format.

This new space — “talk about” — will be more of a proper blog than Virtual Pint. You can expect to find random musings as well as pointers to things of potential interest.

And we can still get interactive. On the sidebar is my offer to talk to me. You’ll find a form where you can make a comment, ask a question, or start a discussion. I’ll respond as soon as I can, and since it will take the form of a post, anyone who visits can comment. That feels even more like a real conversation to me, and I’m looking forward to it.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new space and stop by often.

The Rule

As I’ve been thinking more and more about the writing I want to do next — the fiction, and the screenplays — I find myself wanting to publish The Rule on billboards from Hollywood to New York. And maybe tattoo it on a few foreheads.

I first came across The Rule in 1985, thanks to Alison Bechdel. It’s one way of assessing a movie from a feminist perspective.

The Rule is:
1. It has to have at least two women in it
2. who talk to each other
3. about something other than a man.
(and the optional 4th element — it’s really cool if the women have names!).

Go ahead, do the math. You might be surprised how many movies don’t pass the Rule Test. Or maybe you wouldn’t.

Does this mean that Right-Thinking People shouldn’t see movies that can’t pass the Rule Test? Of course not. Good lord, it would certainly leave out a bunch of great film with all-male casts. But if your movie includes women, wouldn’t it be cool if they were real people too? And got to do real people things just like the guys?

Me, I think it would be great. I’d much rather see a film with no women than a film where the men are human beings and the women are mirrors.

See The Rule in action. With thanks to Alison Bechdel for putting it in the world, and her friend Liz Wallace for nailing the idea.

Giving thanks

I am thankful. I have a good life. I love Nicola and she loves me. I love my handsome old cat who sleeps at my hip and harasses me for drinks of warm water from the bathtub. I love the work that colors and shapes my life, that takes me to places in myself that I can’t go any other way. I get to live other lives when I write, and that makes me live my own life more deeply all the time. I get to do it anytime I want, in a house that feels like a haven to me, with someone who understands my work and helps me do it better, and doesn’t get offended when I leave the dinner table to go make a note about something. I am so grateful for these things.

I am thankful. At a point in life when many people are set on an unswerving course, I find myself suddenly in new territory — learning to write screenplays and discovering that I absolutely love it, and that there’s a real chance I might be very good at it one of these days. I’ve spent a year exhausting myself in the race to stay on the leading edge of the learning curve, getting up at 4 AM because the only way to learn fast is to do twice as much work as an experienced screenwriter would do in the same number of days. I have learned a lot about discipline and focus and sucking it up and going back and making it better. I am so tired and I have had so much fun. I’m grateful for it.

I am thankful. I started to believe a few years ago that I wasn’t really meant to be a writer after all. Being able to write isn’t the same thing as being a writer. I wrote tens of thousands of words in the years after Solitaire, beautiful words that told stories that didn’t ring true, that didn’t take my characters or me anywhere meaningful. Stories that didn’t matter to me. Stories that I thought would be good for my career (I know, blech, I know, but that’s what it was). And then along came the screenplay and it mattered so much and suddenly I found myself full of story, flooding with story, and I sat down and in six weeks wrote the 25,000 words of “Dangerous Space,” and it took me places that left me gasping. And now I am a writer again, with a passion for my work and a confidence in my ability that I have never had before. I am so grateful for that it makes me weep.

I am thankful. I have wonderful friends, intelligent, passionate, funny, caring people who love experience and conversation and connecting. I have four parents who love me and are proud of who I am and what I do. I have a family of in-laws who love me and are glad I am with their daughter, their sister, their aunt. I have good neighbors, and we help each other. I’m grateful for all these people and for the community they give me, that I never expected to have.

I am thankful. The hard things in my life are not hard beyond bearing. Nicola’s multiple sclerosis that kicks her in the teeth sometimes, the way it changes our lives and steals our hope in little bites, and my terror that someday she won’t be able to fight back. The worries about money and career and whether anyone will even give a shit about books in ten years, the dread in my heart over the inevitable death of the cat who has been our companion for 16 years, the fact that I’m the only child of aging parents. The sick feeling that no one will ever publish another of my books. The sadness I feel sometimes because my life is sometimes smaller than I wish, because I am sometimes smaller than I wish. The choices I regret making and the things I’ll never do that I regret even more. And more stuff, boring boring, blah blah blah. These are things that are hard for me, but they don’t kill me and they only shut me down temporarily. I am grateful that I’m becoming enough of a grownup to handle them.

And I’m thankful for everyone who has taken the time to read my work and find something in it to touch you, to make you feel or think, to make you yearn , to help you hope. I’m grateful to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to us all.

More hope

Hi Kelley —

Found my way into some of the comments in your Virtual Pint and felt inclined to comment. First that article on Joshua Bell’™s experience was fascinating. I was thinking that if they had tried it at the end of the day instead of at the beginning when people had more time — it would be different, but then there were the people standing in line for the lottery tickets with time to spare. What that says about our society is kind of frightening really. On the flip side, I found the lack of the public’™s appreciation for him mitigated by the $40/hr he took in. Not so bad really. I wonder what percentage of the number of people who passed through appreciated him vs the percentage of the number of people in our general population who would appreciate him if placed in context for them. That is to ask is that percentage any different than how many people in our culture appreciate classical music? than how many people can see through their own crap and appreciate beauty for beauty’™s sake? Reading that article did not make me feel hopeful.

Then one post led me to another and I read the discussions on hope, that lead me here and here. My first reaction when reading about the Goss book you mentioned was to vehemently disagree, but on reflection, I’™ve about decided that I’™m going to order a copy. (I already checked and my local library doesn’™t have it) I really think the reason I (we) continue on is because of hope. Otherwise, at some point or another it just wouldn’™t be worth it anymore.

While I do agree with what she says about acceptance and about life not turning out the way it ‘˜should’™, I think that’™s more a matter of accepting that life is not ‘˜fair,’™ and not a matter of giving up our hopes, dreams, plans, and/or goals. The idea being acceptance rather than resistance; resistance gives a thing more power and takes the energy away from the solution. Maybe my issue is just that I would probably define hope differently than she does.

As for the question of what is hope? I think it what helps us conquer fear. I don’™t believe we can expel fear from our lives. I think it will always be there, but what I can do is continue on despite the fear. Hope helps me to do that. I wouldn’™t call it the opposite of fear, but I would say it’™s the conqueror of fear (along with action). One could say that actions conquer fear, but how can one act without hope? Call it hope or faith (in myself, my loved ones, the universe), belief, vision, or even goals. It is what keeps the human race going isn’™t it? I understand the argument that accepting failure would negate the fear of it, but I’™m not buying it. Where does the motivation come from? It sounds like she’™s saying that failure is a foregone conclusion. Well, ok, I accept that there will be (have to be) failures along the way, but not that the ultimate outcome will be failure. Maybe we have to change our concept of what that ultimate goal is because of the things we learn from our failures, but if the path has heart, so will the end and so will we. Maybe hope is part of having heart.

That doesn’™t mean that I believe in false hope. I think I understand what you mean about not hoping for a cure for MS. I have faced the loss of hope of a cure for ovarian cancer a loved one facing a recurrence of that. There is a difference between facts and possibilities. It’™s a hard line to draw. Doctors these days are reluctant to give out statistics and predictions for terminally ill patients. The reason for that is they have seen what the results of doing that are; patients who are told they have 2 months to live are more likely to die in two months than those who aren’™t told that. I have seen this happen for myself. Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment. I’™ve faced that choice and had to let my lover know that I faced it with her. Maybe if I’™d faced it sooner, I could’™ve supported her better. Or… maybe when she saw that I had given up hope, she deteriorated more rapidly than necessary. It’™s something I still wonder about these 9 years later. I watched another close relative experience a very similar path with the same disease with a different attitude; one of denial. She was much older, yet lived longer. Who can say why, but it makes me wonder.

Belief/attitude/hope is a powerful force.

Can’™t say I have any answers. This is something that’™s definitely been weighing on my mind lately. Forced into thinking about it as I try to decide if I need to re-work my Plan B or come up with a Plan C…..

I realize this discussion is several months old now; I’™d be interested to hear if you’™re still in the same place with it.

I too loved that quote you had from M L King.

Then this quote from you is why I’™ll read/watch anything you ever write:

“I don’t just want to show you things: I want to put them so far inside you that you have to dig them out with a spoon.”

Blah, blah, blah. Way too much out of me. Feel free to edit this if you put it up.

Best —

Jennifer

No editing necessary. I don’t think I can respond to every point right now, because there are baked potatoes in the oven and a beer in the fridge with my name on it (and I don’t mean that to be flip, just that I’ve been thinking about your comments a long time and could think about them longer, but then you would never have a response). I appreciate the conversation and that you’re willing to take so much time to continue it.

It’s been a wee while since you sent me this (my bad, very sorry) so I’m curious — did you get the Goss book? As much as I’ve talked about it here in the virtual pub, I’m pretty sure I haven’t yet found the right way to encapsulate her point (oh ho, maybe that’s why she wrote a whole book about it, laughing now). Or perhaps it’s that I find my understanding of “hope” is changing as I try to integrate her perspective into my view of things.

Am I in the same place with this? Hmm. Yes and no. I don’t feel hopeless, but I no longer rely so much on hope. I think that what you said above — Holding out hope (hoping against hope) for a miracle could prevent one from making the most of what is in this moment — is perhaps a good parsing of her point. If we rely on magical thinking, if we decide okay, I will get this thing or person or result I want if I don’t step on a crack, or if I don’t call her first, or if I pray hard enough, then maybe we miss the opportunity to just give a rebel yell and do the thing to the fullest in the moment when it needs to be done. And if we do the thing, and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean we did it wrong. It doesn’t mean we were wrong to reach for it, to throw ourselves out there (to, as they say, dance like no one’s watching). It just means that it didn’t work out. And that’s how it goes sometimes. Right now, I think that’s what she means, and right now I can mostly be okay with that. Would I be okay if it were the death of a lover I was talking about, if it were Nicola’s death? Probably fucking not. So I’m not sure where I am.

Except that I know I’m in a doing place, a place of action without as much expectation as before. I do think that it’s possible to act without hope, by which perhaps I mean this expectation that things will work out the way I want them to. I still want them to work out, on some level I still hope they will — I just don’t necessarily pin my self-esteem or lifetime happiness or sense of worth on it the way I used to. And in some weird way this has freed me to, among other things, be braver about what I write and love my writing more. Why? I don’t know, it’s a mystery.

And since I’m in quote mode at the moment, here are a couple more:

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. ‘” Anais Nin

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.
‘” Mary Catherine Bateson

I know this is in no way a complete answer to your very thoughtful comments. Thank you for them. And thank you also for your kind words about digging and spoons. It’s true, that’s what I want in almost every respect right now. Life’s short. Let’s just reach right in.