Solitude vs. the beautiful, chaotic hum

I’ve just returned from being out of the country for two weeks. During that time, I didn’t write anything but a postcard to my mom, assuring her that I was still alive. I attempted to write a couple of short emails to business contacts, when I had a few stolen moments on someone’s computer, but the French keyboard was so frustrating to use that I gave up (or, rather, gqvé up) after a couple of sentences. [A blog post appeared here last week through the miracle of Blogger’s post-dating feature—I’d written it before I left on my trip and it automatically uploaded while I was gone.]

The weird thing was that I didn’t feel a desire or need to write. This is an unusual feeling for me. Since I have known how to use a pencil to shape letters and words, I’ve had a persistent urge to write my thoughts down, though in recent years that urge has been satisfied by writing weekly essays rather than the daily journal updates of my youth.

I wasn’t experiencing any kind of creative constipation, but felt like some other, more visual/experiential part of my brain had been activated. I only wanted to take photos and make short movies of Parisian scenes, and to walk and take it all in—to eat luxurious meals, feel the breeze on my face, listen to street music, smell the pastries and chocolates—without attempting to describe any of it.

Perhaps in order to write about something, a writer must step back, set herself apart from things in order to filter and describe them. But in France, especially on the streets of Paris, I wanted to be a part of the beautiful, chaotic hum. Maybe if I’d spent a few weeks there I would have grown tired of it, or would feel a need to step back and return to the deep solitude I seem to only achieve during the writing process.

Now I am back in my quieter neighborhood, looking out to a narrow forest of oak trees from my bedroom window. My cat purrs on my bed, birds are speaking urgently to their kin outside. It is calm and maybe a little dull, but somehow it is stimulating for me—or is stimulating another part of my brain that was inactive during my European adventure. Thoughts and ideas for essays I could write began pouring out of me the day after I got home, especially after this morning’s walk on the sleepy streets around my house. I am suddenly a homebody, wanting to hang around the house, eat simple salads, pull weeds in my yard, and write. I am no longer yearning for pastries and people-watching on the Metro. I want to belong right now to a large but invisible community that is quiet and shaped by words, to seek immersion in ideas not crowds. I need both things—noise/conversation and quiet/thoughts. Finding the balance is an ongoing event in this writer’s life.

(Photos by Beth Blevins)

Another one bites the dust

An alternative title for this post might be “And then there was one” because I am shutting down my other, remaining blog, Quotes About Creative Women—at least for the summer.

I started QACW because I wanted a place to hold all the quirky and moving quotes I’d read over the years, from Barbara Kingsolver talking about leaving Kentucky because she was flat-chested to Joni Mitchell talking about her grandmothers. I thought that the blog would be another way to connect with friends, whom I surely thought would want to add quotes of their own, or share their favorite women’s quotes; to sweeten the deal, I promised to link to the web pages of contributors—but, alas, I only got one submission.

I also wanted to experiment with using a blog as a database—most of the women (and the few men) I quoted are listed alphabetically using a subject term that maybe I created myself: “writers—Doe-Jane,” which Blogger indexes alphabetically (if you use commas, as in most standard cataloging, Blogger separates each word as a distinct subject term). Hey, I have an MLS, so I might as well put it to use. I found that I didn’t want to index just by last name when I posted quotes by both Alice Walker and her daughter.

But the main reason I started that other blog (along with what was once my cooking/food blog) was to make money. Yes, ha-ha, I’ve discovered that blogs don’t make money. You’re supposed to get a penny every time someone clicks on a Google ad link in your blog, and then you get a check when you reach your first $10. As you can guess, I never reached it. I also added Amazon-links to the books I quoted (not just to make money, but to promote the wonderful books I was discovering), but I made no sales. [Just for the record, I’ve never tried to make money on Writing Home, so I still have some integrity left.] 

It was fun, at least at first, to go out and find new quotes after my initial batch of quotes was posted. I used Google Books and searched for “women and creativity” and any similar terms I could think of. This led me to authors and books I never would have discovered otherwise, which I purchased or borrowed through interlibrary loan at my local library. Through this effort I first read Yvonne Vera, Susan Minot, and Judith Ortez Cofer, among others.

So, I have no regrets that I started QACW, and I hope someday (maybe in the near future) to start adding new quotes to it again, though it will probably not be on a regular basis since I don’t have easy access to a big library, nor time enough to graze lazily through it.

How are people chosen for Writing Home interviews?

If you’re looking for a theme or commonality among the people I’ve interviewed for this blog so far, it’s pretty simple—they are all people I know or have met at some point in my life. I have been happy to reconnect with writers I’ve known for brief periods in my life, as well as to provide a forum for some of my more creative and prolific friends.

For instance, I was so glad to reconnect with Barry Yeoman again, who was a colleague for a short time when I was a reporter in North Carolina in the mid-1980s. And I’ve known Kim Kupperman nearly continuously since we were the “womyn’s” co-editors at the school newspaper at UC-Santa Cruz.

The other thing about the interviews is that each has provided me with insight into how creative people produce and publish their work. A common thread I’ve noticed among them is that many say that they feel grumpy or blue unless they produce something—that they need to write or paint every day or, at least, on a regular schedule. I feel the same way, which may explain why I’m so crabby during weeks when I’m too busy with paid work or household errands to sit down and write for any significant amount of time.

I have a few more interviewees lined up for the near future. However, it is inevitable that I am going to run out of people I am personally acquainted with who could serve as interview subjects. Of course, I’d like to meet other writers, to widen my circle of writer/artist friends, and hope I will at local writers’ conferences and workshops in the next year or so. But until then, if you’re a writer who reads this blog, or if you’re someone I may have met or corresponded with at some point in the past and you’re up for an interview, free to email me at thebethblevins AT gmail DOT com (do the usual substitutions there).

The other possibility, of course, is that I will simply run out of acquaintances to interview and I’ll just let the interviews fade away—which might be OK, too, since it would be one less thing to keep me from buckling down and writing fiction and non-blog essays (no matter how bad they turn out to be.)

Dear Garrison Keillor

Dear Garrison Keillor,

Please hire new writers for Prairie Home Companion and let them breathe new life into it.

PHC is starting to feel like the wheezy old relative you dread to see coming up the walkway because he rattles on with the same spittle-infested stories every week or makes even new events sound moldy.

I never found Guy Noir charming, but I tolerated it for the first couple of seasons, figuring you’d run the gamut with it and be done. But it was introduced in 1995 and it's still on most weeks. Assuming that Guy Noir is at least partially your alter-ego, it’s depressing and awkward to hear him try to hook up with women in his role as a mediocre detective. I know it's a parody of old radio-hour detective shows, nevertheless, it feels a little—I hate to say it—Woody Allen-ish.

As for Life of the Cowboys—I continue to think the whole premise of early American cowboys juxtaposed into modern times is clever, and I wouldn’t mind hearing it occasionally as something you could revive for special occasions. But not every week, please.

There are a thousand other stories and characters that you all could be presenting instead of Guy Noir or the cowboys. Why not have a contest and let young playwrights submit their short radio plays for your ensemble to perform—do a new one every week and have listeners vote on their favorite at the end of the year. Present the winning playwright with an award during the last show of the year and/or give them a one-year writing gig or internship at PHC. Or, at least, solicit ideas for new characters or new skits from your listeners.

Also consider letting writers from a publication like The Onion contribute something once a month or even weekly—something weird and new, presented in under three minutes. Let people submit tall tales or real life stories on tape and fly in the best people to sit there and perform them—once a year or once a month.

While you’re at it, stop relying so much on sound effects to fill the time. Your sound effects people are very talented at what they do. It’s just that they shouldn’t be doing it so much of the time, or they should be doing it in the background, to add depth to the performances.

Even if you did nothing else but your brilliant,  suddenly inspired "News from Lake Wobegon" in each show, it would be enough of a contribution to any PHC. The problem is that I have usually turned the radio off these days before you get there. I miss it.

Sincerely, 

Your past and future fan, Beth Blevins

Six words? Short attention span literature.

One of the warm-up exercises at the flash fiction workshop I went to last year was to write a six-word short story, inspired by Wired Magazine’s Very Short Stories  invitational, which, in turn, had been inspired by Hemingway’s famous six-word story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

I dutifully wrote a few short shorts, none of which I read aloud, and didn’t think about writing any more after that. (You’ll see why, after looking at the following samples—the best of the bunch I did that day):

This door leads to nowhere. Go.

“I’m pregnant.” She exhaled smoke. “Damn!”

Mostly this exercise confirmed for me that I am not an aphoristic kind of writer. I’m still Southern, at heart—when I have a chance to talk or write, I want to take my own sweet time about it.

Then, at a weekend women’s retreat I went to in March, we were told to write our life stories in six words. This time, we were asked to share them aloud, and terse tales poured out of most of the women there. Half-heartedly I tried to talk about my life concisely, but once pen hit paper, it wanted to keep going. Many of my six-word efforts complained about only having six words to express myself in, e.g., “Hard to compress in six words” and “I hate being my own editor.”(The only good thing I wrote, maybe, was: "Don't waste your time on jerks.") Meanwhile, some of the women were so inspired by the exercise they wrote multiple passages that they then decorated and scrapbooked.

Now Newsweek magazine has taken up the effort. In its new, redesigned format, which hit newsstands last week, its letter page features a box at the bottom that says “IN SIX WORDS.” Last week’s topic: “Your thoughts on swine flu.” (At the bottom of the box, it says “Inspired by SMITH Magazine’s Six-Word Memoir Project.”).

My worry for writers is that if we give into too much succinct expression, it might stifle our ability to write broad, elegant, luxurious prose—that we'll, in effect, Tweet away our talent if we express every thought, at any moment, in bite-size pieces. My other worry is that readers will grow used to ingesting small spoonfuls of prose, unable to stick with anything beyond a computer screen, or worse, status line or cellphone screen.

Of course, it's ironic that I'm expressing this dismay in a blog posting that will run without continuation on a computer screen, and that I don't often read long books or even long essays anymore, drawn as I am to the life bubbling up in my own household, to the lives of my friends expressed in "What's on your mind?" Facebook updates. But at least, I console myself, it took 469 words to reach this ironic conclusion.

A newsprint survivor talks about life at the Rocky Mountain News, and where print media is headed

To add to my ongoing, occasional postings on newspapers, in which I've described some of my experiences as a reporter and examined the shrinking of print newspapers, I wanted to talk to someone who had worked at a newspaper that has closed shop.

It just so happens that one of my high school buddies, Rick Henderson, worked for the recently closed Rocky Mountain News (RMN). He and I recently reconnected via Facebook, and I asked him about what it was like to work for a newspaper that was doomed, and what he thinks will happen to newspapers—and newspaper reporters—now that print media is bleeding advertisers and subscribers.

Although Rick and I are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, we have a lot in common. We both started small press ventures in North Carolina (Rick, The Deregulator, a free tabloid-style paper with a Libertarian focus, and me, a very small magazine, a tiny literary/vanity pub devoted to parody); we both grew up in Wilkes County, NC; we both went to UNC (though at different times); and we both blog.

Rick worked at RMN as an editorial writer from January 2006 until the paper closed at the end of February this year. Before that he worked for other papers including the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., and the Review-Journal in Las Vegas, as well as Investor's Business Daily and Reason magazine. Rick now works as the managing editor for Carolina Journal, where his first article for them, unsurprisingly, is on the demise of print media: The demise of traditional news outlets opens doors for high-quality alternatives. In addition, in March, Rick wrote about the closing of RMN for the National Review. 

What did you do at the RMN?

I was an editorial writer who also handled some production/pagination duties, solicited op-eds, posted content to the web site, etc. When I started in 2006 there were two other staff writers and my boss who roughly spent half their time writing editorials and the other half writing bylined columns. The two writers retired in 2007 when the paper was cutting staff. So for the final 18 months or so, I was the only full-time editorial writer at the paper, so I typically produced something for print—often the lead editorial—every day.

When did you know that it was the end at RMN? Were there prior warnings for or was it sudden?

In early December 2008, E.W. Scripps Co., the Rocky's owners, announced they were putting the paper up for sale and that if they found no buyers by mid-January they would consider "other options." At that point, I figured it was a matter of time before the paper closed. The paper had offered buyouts to about 20 percent of the newsroom around 18 months before that, and had no difficulty getting takers—a lot of reporters and editors who had been there for 30-plus years and were at or beyond retirement age anyway, so they took the buyouts.

Denver's situation was unusual in that the Rocky and the Denver Post were equal partners in a joint-operating agreement. The Post's owners, MediaNews, were in a world of hurt financially; Scripps was not. MediaNews had acquired pieces of a number of money-losing papers in recent years (in San Jose, Detroit, L.A.). But Scripps had exited several metro markets (including Albuquerque and Cincinnati), and had given every indication it wanted to concentrate on suburban or bedroom communities that might have no local TV station to siphon off ad dollars -- and where its papers were more likely to be profitable in the long term.

The group operating the Denver JOA received $100 million less in ad revenues in 2008 than it did five years earlier. And the Rocky had lost about $18 million in 2008. Scripps made no secret it wanted to cut its losses and leave Denver, even if MediaNews might be teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and might not survive had Scripps subsidized the Rocky's operations another year or so.

Morale remained remarkably high at the paper, even up to the day the paper published its final edition. To be sure there was anger at Scripps, in part because the paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April, and a lot of us were hoping Scripps would keep it afloat at least that long. Plus, the Rocky and the Post had fought some brutal circulation wars over the past 30 years, and the Post won every one because (in perception, anyway), the Post was more eager to fight than Scripps. Aside from that, however, the esprit de corps was remarkable.

What are your ex-colleagues doing?

There were about 220 people in the Rocky's newsroom when the paper closed. So a lot of them are looking for work. About 10 of them were hired by the Post, mainly high-profile metro columnists and reporters. My former boss, the editorial-page editor, was hired as an opinion page columnist; he was pretty influential in the community and is a terrific writer.

Another half-dozen or so got jobs as government PIOs during the paper's final weeks, or went to work for nonprofits. Since I left the area, I'm not sure what most of them are doing now.

What is happening to the blog/web pub that former RMN reporters were trying to put together?

The InDenverTimes.com project tried to operate with 30 employees, online only. Had they signed up 50,000 people to pay $5 a month, then several Colorado investors were reportedly ready to kick in enough capital to make the web site a full-time newsroom. They got more like 3,000 instead. A few of the sparkplugs behind the Web idea are trying to come up with another proposal, but I have no idea if they'll make a go of it. The Rocky Mountain News was deeply loved by its readers, but apparently not so loved that former subscribers were willing to pay a little bit of money to keep a second daily news operation in Denver alive.

Do you think the print newspaper will survive? How do you think people will be getting their daily dose of news in five years?

The demand for the information newspapers produced may be greater now than it ever has been, thanks to the Internet. It's a case of supply creating its own demand -- from newspapers' free online content to web sites dedicated to the news (Politico, for example), blogs, and nonprofits (including my own publication or the Pro Publica outfit).

The challenge for traditional or legacy media organizations is figuring out how to get users to provide enough revenue so that publishers can pay journalists. I'm still not sure whether it was a mistake for newspapers to provide content for free online. Readers never have liked firewalls. It's also easier to just give stuff away, drive up pageviews, and hope you can figure out some way to collect from readers.

The publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, John Temple, has started a blog called Temple Talk where he throws out ideas about how media organizations will establish new business models over time. He's very thoughtful about these issues and believes the traditional newsroom is dead. To survive, he believes a "paper" that might have operated with a 200-person newsroom in 2008 might have to shrink to one-tenth that size and get a lot of its content from amateurs, free-lancers, stringers, etc. The paid staff would primarily be editors/gatekeepers who decide which stories deserve most prominent play and throw a lot of stuff out there with minimal line-by-line oversight.

I think the next few years are extremely worrisome. The media landscape is going to undergo upheaval for another five or ten years as media organizations desperately try to figure out how to attract revenues from online readers. And until then, newspapers, magazines, and even radio and TV stations will continue to reduce staffing. Newsrooms are going to shrink. The recession simply acclerated a downturn that began a few years ago when Craigslist, Yahoo, and other online outlets provided an alternative to traditional media—particularly newspaper classfieds and radio/TV ads of any kind. Even alternative weeklies are struggling because their advertising/revenue base has largely migrated to the Internet.

As a result, there will be less media oversight of large public and private institutions. There will be attempts to fill in that information void from new sources, including nonprofits like the one I work for, which has full-time investigative reporters on staff, along with freelancers. There'll be bloggers who will cover city council meetings, for example. But they won't have the same access to public officials (and whistleblowers/leakers) that newspapers enjoyed, so much more of the operations of institutions will go unreported. At least until people figure out a business model that works for sustainable, local online journalism.

Do you think Internet-based publications are a viable job option for writers/reporters? Are any of them paying well? 

A good friend and former Riverside colleague went to work for a startup political web site Scripps opened (and then closed) last year. So even major media companies with presumably deep pockets are still experimenting with ideas to create commercially viable content providers. And as I mentioned before, mainline media outlets of all varieties are shrinking.

This is a roundabout way of saying Internet publications may or may not be a stable outlet for unemployed traditional journalists. Every situation is different.

I continue to believe community weeklies should remain viable (and could indeed expand) as metro dailies shrink. If I were starting a weekly in a small town or an exurb, I'd publish tons of community-service announcements and do some butt-kicking reporting on local government. And I'd consider putting almost none of my content online. Force people to pick you up and read you; that's the best way to give value to advertisers.

I am now officially un-cool

I have a confession to make, and since I’m not Catholic, I might as well make it in the confession-booth-like confines of this blog posting.

Lately, I’ve been listening to Country and Western music in my car.

This is quite a confession, coming from someone who grew up listening to rock, went to punk and new wave concerts in college [yes, that's me in the pic at the right, at my most decadent], and who used to consider herself cool. But I don’t like most music that’s available on the radio in the D.C. metro area (Hip Hop, overproduced R&B, tired classic rock or meaningless pop hits). The one alternative station I can receive goes out of range three miles away from my house (and it plays the Grateful Dead too much, for my taste). I like the Classical station but not for short drives since I can never get in an entire symphonic movement. So, on short drives, when NPR is playing “Car Talk” or some other show I’m not wild about, my finger reaches for the C&W button.

As I drive from errand to errand in my minivan, I wonder why I’ve gravitated to C&W, not sure if it’s a familiar trajectory, from disenfranchised youth to middle-aged suburbanite, raging hormones to stable sentimentality (if rock music is all about sexual love, then much of current C&W music is about the responsible aftermath, or what I call “love with a mortgage”). But I tell myself it’s my writer’s curiosity, that C&W songs tell stories. And sometimes I like even the most treacle-y songs because I like trying to predict the outcome.

When I first heard the song, You Can Let Go by Crystal Shawanda, I was able to predict the third verse while still listening to the first. “The dad’s going to die in the end!” I announced to my disinterested teenage son. “She’s going to tell him to let go on his deathbed.” Even though I called it correctly, I choked up at the end. In fact, I still have to turn the station if that song comes on now.

But I’m not entirely devoid of cynicism. My son and I sometimes play a game in the car where we take a predictable C&W song and turn it into something ridiculous or jaded. Thus, the Brad Paisley song, When I Get Where I'm Going ("When I get where I'm going/on the far side of the sky./The first thing that I'm gonna do/Is spread my wings and fly") inspired us to spontaneously sing: “You know that when I die/I’m going to go into the ground/My body will putrify/But my bones will stick around...”).

Maybe C&W needs a droll/playful sub-set or a fusion with some other, less optimistic genre, but I'm not sure it's going to happen anytime soon—and I'm not even sure I'd tune into it in the car if it does. Maybe the thing I most appreciate about C&W is its earnestness, how (like me, these days) it doesn't really try to be hip.

Tiny tales of technology: Flash drives

The other week a writer friend took what looked to be a small, striped toiletry bag out of her leather purse, unzipped it and dumped its contents on the table. An array of flash drives poured out, in an assortment of neon colors, looking like so many flattened lipstick tubes. She said she backs up all her writing on these flash drives, color coded according to the type of writing, and carries them with her everywhere because she doesn't trust computers. 

"But what if you're mugged," I asked.

"Then I'd still have it on my computer."

"What if your house burns down the same day you're mugged?" I asked.

"Then I would be in a lot of  trouble," she replied.

This has inspired me to find a less home-based method of backup. I'm thinking of putting all my writing from all my computers and external hard drives onto one mega-flash drive and locking it up in a safety deposit box, at least until that thumb-size technology is eclipsed by something else.

Why I'm not buying an e-reader

I am not going to buy a Kindle. Not even if print newspapers disappear and "print" news is available only on such a device. Not even if paperbacks and hardcovers go away and all new books are issued electronically.

My obstinance in this regard is not from a tactile need to feel and smell a paper book, nor because I love getting black ink on my hands every morning when I read the Washington Post. The reason I won't buy a Kindle is the same reason I never buy anything but Dollar Store sunglasses anymore: I'm sure I would lose it. I would set it down on a Metro seat or leave it at someone's house and that would be the end of it. Not such a bad thing when you lose a paperback book that costs five bucks, but near tragic when the device you're reading it on costs more than $100.

Perhaps it is because I am a kleptomaniac when it comes to pens—my drawers are full of pens I've permanently borrowed from stores (to sign credit card receipts, etc.) and from friends—that the universe requires a balance. Thus, I constantly lose sunglasses. So many sunglasses that I now buy five to ten cheap pairs at the start of the summer, and feel lucky if I can get to the end of the summer with one pair left.

So, when the Kindle sells for a dollar, or it's as cheap as a pen and friends don't mind too much if I absently take it from them, I'll be glad to have one, no matter how temporary.

I am Big Brother

Although I vowed in a November post (Blog site counters—or spyware?)  that I wouldn’t use Sitemeter here, not long afterwards I added it to this blog. It’s the little green box at the bottom of the screen.

The information that Sitemeter provides was just too alluring. Among its many features are:

• a world map that shows the location where this blog’s readers were the moment they looked at it;
• which posting(s) they looked at;
• how long they looked at the posting (it’s disappointing to see that many readers only look at this blog for “0 seconds,” although that seems humanly impossible);
• the search terms they used to get to it; and
• the referring web sites that sent them here.

In case you're wondering why you don't see all of these things when you look at Sitemeter, I’ve blocked access to this info to the outside world.

Through Sitemeter’s World Map feature I see that in April alone I’ve had anonymous readers from more than eight countries including Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia and India. (However, to be perfectly honest, many of the readers from other countries account for the “0 seconds” searches.) This is something I never achieved in my days as the publisher of a very small magazine. I had a few foreign subscribers, but not from such a breadth of countries. However, one might argue that my magazine subscribers really wanted to read the product; it was not something they just happened to click on, or which showed up in a list of search results. They actually paid for it, including the additional cost of international postage.

Sitemeter’s “By Referrals” feature has shown me which web sites have linked to my blog. This is something that cannot be easily found with a Google search, and which other bloggers seem to do quietly on their own. (I’ll list these in a separate post someday since I’d like to acknowledge and thank them).

It’s also through Sitemeter that I’ve discovered that I may never live down the “Beautiful Poem” I wrote on poetry.com—someone searching for “poems on flatulence” found my blog posting about that silly submission.

But Sitemeter gives me a little too much information sometimes. If a friend from Wyoming told me that he or she looks at my blog, I’d know they are lying—the Sitemeter World Map shows no readers from Wyoming. I try not to use Sitemeter to spy on people I know who may have looked at my blog, though sometimes I discover it accidentally.

The too-much-information category would also include details on what kind of computer system the person was using (Mac or Windows), the names of businesses and organizations in whose computers the person typed the search (if they didn't do it at home), and what their Internet provider is. The worst example of this is that I know that in April, someone at a specific YMCA in a specific town in Connecticut searched for “HBO real sex lick it” and wound up looking briefly at my essay, On getting free HBO for a month.

Sitemeter is quietly gathering all this information to use as I wish. I won’t use most of it. All I'm really curious about is how people find this blog. But I wonder, as I said in my previous post, who else might be gathering and looking at such information and for what purposes they might use it.  Perhaps there is a hidden cost to so much free information on the Internet, especially when it's being distributed by sinister or greedy people.