Creative | this woman's work

I know what this means

The Story of My Life, Writing 5 Responses »

Jul 302010

There are these two ex-boyfriends I sometimes dream about and the symbolism for both of them is absolutely clear to me. The first boyfriend appears when I am thinking about my most creative self. He represents my urge to chuck it all and go tearing selfishly around the world living only for my want to write. The second one shows up whenever I’m struggling with my creative career. He represents my need for professional accomplishment as a writer. Back in my youth, I thought that when I was dreaming about them that I was dreaming about THEM but then in my thirties (I think?) I realized I was really dreaming about myself and since I’ve figured that out, it’s made those dreams much more useful to me.

Last night I had a dream about the second one and it was so transparent.

The first part of my dream, I was in his apartment with another writer friend of mine who is at home with small children (younger than mine) and we were discussing her resume and how to work it to help her go back to this career that has nothing to do with writing (and which she’s never had in real life). We were talking about how to structure her resume so that she could get a job that would meet her practical needs (financial, parental and personal) but still give her time to write. You know, like what I’m hoping school will be for me. The ex-boyfriend was sitting at a table away from us scribbling away on notepaper and I leaned in and and said to her, rolling my eyes, “It’s easier for him. He doesn’t have to compartmentalize everything like we do.”

Then in the second part of my dream, I came back through his apartment like the way you might walk through a bus station. This time I was holding Madison’s hand and she was a very little girl. I was holding her hand tightly because I was afraid that she might get into trouble or get hurt in the apartment but at the same time, I wanted her to see the apartment and I wanted the ex-boyfriend to see her. Then I cut through the front door and was relieved that she was still with me.

I mean, really. So transparent.

So the ex-boyfriend is my professional writing career and the conversation in the first part is about feeling resentful that I can’t give the time to my writing career that I’d like to (but also feeling hopeful) and the second part is worrying — as I always worry — that my kids will not get what they need or that I will not get what I need.

I have dreams that are about these things ALL THE TIME. It’s the story of my life. It’s the story of lots of lives (maybe yours).

I find these dreams very comforting even though nothing gets resolved. I find them comforting because they are an acknowledgment of my struggle. Sometimes when I’m feeling excessively grouchy I’ll have a dream and understand that my grouch has to do a bigger frustration than having to wash the towels twice because I left them too long in the washer and they got mildewed. Those dreams are a reminder of my SELF and that I need to keep an eye on that part of me and pay attention to it and remember to nurture it.

The fact that these are ex-boyfriends getting all symbolic up in my dreams also made me think about how pre-Brett I dated boys who had something I wanted. I dated boys who I wanted to be like and then I decided that maybe I would quit looking for these qualities in a partner and instead start looking for these qualities in myself. And then when I started doing that I met Brett. Or more like my heart was open for meeting Brett who is his own self and not an imaginary who-I-want-to-be. Brett enhances my life and enhances me while before those relationships — through no fault of the guys who were in them with me — left me feeling frustrated and insecure and unhappy. It makes sense though because you can’t marry someone to fill up your empty spaces; you have to find someone who gives you the strength and ability and encouragement to fill those spaces up yourself.

Look at that. I started writing about dreams and I ended up writing about marriage. Such is the wandering mind unleashed on a journal, eh?

Writing as therapy

Blogging 12 Responses »

Jun 032010

Do you ever read someone’s blog and think, no! Stop! You’re too vulnerable! Don’t hang this out there! We talk a lot about how much we should share about our kids but there’s the sharing of ourselves, too. For the past month, I often cringed when I was reading Katie’s blog but I’ve cringed reading her blog before, too. She’s very widely read and she blogs about EVERYTHING. She blogged her divorce, she blogged her pregnancy losses. She blogs at her site and on Babble and she gets terrible, awful, mean comments but she keeps blogging.

Most of us writers already knew what many bloggers discover, which is that writing is one of the best ways to figure out what in the heck is going on with our lives. You can write your way out of a problem and into a new attitude. You can start writing in one place and put your pen down with a sigh (or lean back away from your keyboard) and realize that you have written yourself into a whole better place.

Katie is also a huge blogging as activism person. She has always been a strong advocate for breastfeeding and she has always blogged the hell out of it even when working full-time meant she had to partially wean her youngest. She blogs from a feminist, pro-woman, pro-motherhood perspective and some of her best work has been around the topic. I have no doubt that she will take her passion and her skill and create more wonderful writing out of her personal tragedy because she is driven not just to write her way through her struggles but also to use her work as a means to help other people through their struggles.

Blogging is powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s public but because it’s public and because blogging is rarely a carefully planned event for most of us (most of us kinda just wing it, right? I know I do) it means that people get snapshots of us as works in progress. To me, that’s what’s so wonderful about a blog and what makes it a piece of performance art (as long as it isn’t taken over by product reviews and memes — a little bit of that goes a long way, eh?). It’s a virtual permanent record of our impermanency, a record of our growth and change and the patterns of who we are and who we are becoming.

When I teach blogging classes, I always give examples of blogs that are pretty rigid in their scope because I think for a new, nervous blogger having a focus can make it easier to get started. I also think that the irony of giving yourself strict limits it that it can force you to be more creative. If you are blogging, say, only about bikes you have owned, you will have to dig in deep to make that interesting. You may start by just writing about finding your first trike under your Christmas tree and then find yourself another time writing about the specific sound of the bell on the handlebars and the fantasy you had of yourself in other people’s eyes, powerful and fast on your first two-wheeler, ringing the bell so people would stop and stare in astonishment to see you fly by so fast.

At the same time, I think for those of us who stick ourselves or who are stuck by others in genres need to remember that blogs are not like books. A book may need to be easily categorized but a blog is a living thing. It is growing and maturing and while the readers help build the blog and help guide the blogger through their visits and comments (a popular topic may inspire us to write more on that topic), we are the authors and we get to define what we are. It’s why I’m grateful now that I gave my blog such a broad title way back when. If I’d defined my blog more narrowly — as “just” an adoption blog or “just” a writer’s blog — I’d have a hard time justifying my need to write other things; I’d be worried about disappointing my audience. But I’ve found that some of you like the posts on writing and some like the posts on adoption and some of you never ever comment unless I write something about, say, freelancing. It’s all good. And for me, it’s all been good therapy, too.

In other words, you can write more about bikes if you want to. You’re the boss of your blog.

So when I think about giving up my blog in January, I lean more toward remembering that I get to decide what it is and how to work it. I can change my scope. I can also take down archives. (I know they live on in internet cache but only a really dedicated spirit could find them and then god love her, let her read ‘em!) I think maybe I will give myself useful rules like that I will only write on Wednesdays perhaps or that I will only write on X or something like. I won’t be sure until I get there, I guess. But I do look forward to a time when I can afford to take down the ads because I’ve never much liked having those.

WordPress for a presentation

work work work 13 Responses »

Jan 202010

Yesterday’s Digital Storytelling workshop went really well so I wanted to share the presentation I put together over here.

I had to borrow Abby‘s laptop because our own isn’t reliable anymore (I’m on a desktop now — it’s crazy. It’s like 2005 up in here). I wasn’t sure if she had presentation software and I’m sick of Powerpoint anyway so I decided to build the presentation online. I tried some free software and it was buggy and crashing and making me crazy. After many wasted hours, I hit on using a WordPress install. I’m extremely happy with the way this turned out.

There are a lot of advantages to using blogging software to create a presentation. One, it’s easy to make it look the way you want it to look. I knew I wanted a very simple installation with a clean, unfettered appearance. I looked for themes without sidebars and hit on Suffusion, which is easy to customize even if you can’t or don’t want to dig into code. I knew I likely wouldn’t be using any widget areas but this particular theme has a lot of widget configuration options — sidebars, footers, etc.

The other thing that was important to me for the presentation was accessibility. I wanted the attendees to be able to come back to the information without cluttering anyone up with hand-outs. Because I was sharing videos, I also wanted to make it easy for students to quickly find those videos again from their own laptops. To do this with a Powerpoint would have meant relying on a file sharing site like Slideshare, which is a frustrating site for me time-wise and design-wise. There is no love lost between me and Slideshare. Using WordPress makes it easy for anyone to go back to the presentation and also made it easy for me to share resources via the blogroll/links.

I didn’t open up comments for this workshop although I see how that could add to a workshop experience. It might be something I’d consider in the future.

If you look at Digital Storytelling, you can see how I structured it similar to a PowerPoint. We teach at Wild Goose Creative, which has wifi — an important factor for an online presentation. I made the WordPress site’s front page an actual static page. You can create that in the “reading” section of WordPress. I didn’t set a page for the blog to post to because I knew I wouldn’t need a blog page. Instead I set it up so that there was only one blog post per page. You can see this in the image below:

That gave me a front page that acts as an introduction page.

Then I started adding entries. I added each entry the way you would in any old blog but I kept things short because I wanted everything to fit on the screen so I wouldn’t have to scroll. (We use a projector and a laptop so I knew what size screen I’d be dealing with.) As I tweaked the presentation order, I changed the dates in the Publish menu so that things would show up where I wanted them to. For example, the first entry I made was Madeleine L’Engle‘s quote but I needed that to happen much later in the workshop. I just changed the date to make sure it showed up between the two entries I needed it to go between — so later than the one but earlier than the other.

To make the “Start the Workshop” tab show in the menu, I installed a plugin called “Page Links To” (I use it here, too, to put Madison’s blog and Open Adoption Support in the navigation menu up there at the top). Basically this plugin adds a new field to your “Add New” Page menu. You create the title for your page, skip writing an actual entry and then scroll down to this new Page Links To field, which asks for a url. You add the url that you want the page to link to and voila! You have a Page that is actually a link. This is an incredibly handy plugin for managing your blog’s page navigation system without doing any code hacking.

So. I used the very first entry’s url as the page url with my Page Links To plugin, titled the page “Start the Workshop” and that added that nifty little menu tab up at the top of my presentation.

Because there was only one entry on each page, I then simply scrolled through my archives (another plus to the blog theme I chose is the clean, easy to follow “previous” and “next” navigation above each entry. MUCH nicer than the theme I’m using here. Makes me want to change it out. Seriously). I took screenshots of each of the videos to make those images and then linked the images to the video’s homepage. I didn’t want to embed the players because I thought it’d be easier to open up the video files in browser tabs before we got started. This way their flash files could begin loading (and so we wouldn’t have to wait for them when it was time to watch). Also I liked the way it looked. But mostly it was to make it easier to quickly scroll through the presentation and then simply click to an open tab to watch each video as needed.

Anyway. I thought I’d share both the presentation and the tech behind it. If you have questions about the install or about the content of the presentation, let me know and I’ll come back between busyness. (Like the quotes at the end? I can talk about why I chose them and what we did around them so you’ll have a better understanding of how the workshop worked.) Again, here’s the link.

Thinking about graduate degrees

work work work 11 Responses »

Jan 022009

typewriterface I’ve been thinking about graduate school for awhile now. Just thinking, mind you, because I have a ludicrous amount of debt from graduating with a sociology degree from a sub-standard state university in a state which was not my residence (I moved to Oregon to go to school). Even though I had a full scholarship the last year, the full scholarship was to cover the cost if one was a resident and this one was not so I still had massive loans my senior year. I am still paying them off. I may be paying them off FOREVER. Noah and Madison may be paying them off after I’m gone (not really — I have insurance).

Despite this, I’ve been thinking about graduate school because theoretically I could get someone else to pay for graduate school the way I theoretically got my last year at Portland State covered. But I’m just thinking about it and googling a bit.

I know it’s stupid but I want an MFA (in creative nonfiction) so I can teach. I know this is stupid because MFAs are a dime a dozen and it’s a whole lot of money and time and angst (workshopping!) for no guarantees after but I’m still kinda interested. Because one of the things I learned about myself this last year is that I really like teaching and I’d really like to teach more and I’d rather teach adults than kids.

I don’t want in on academia, (which is good because I think I’m too old to even think about trying to hustle my way on the tenure track). I’d just like to teach now and then here and there. I looked briefly at getting an MEd in adult education and maybe I ought to consider that a little more except that, of course, I’m not considering anything because I need to make money and I don’t see how I could go to school AND try to get a TA position to pay for school AND make money. But you know, I’m thinking about it. I’m open to the possibilities.

And I’m going to think more about workshops because, man, do I like leading them.

A nice way to ring in the new year

Friends 3 Responses »

Jan 012009

The Book About Moomin, Mymble and Little My We went to a party last night where we only knew the hosts but ended up having a great time and stayed ’til after the new year. Catherine, the host, gave me the moomin book pictured here, which was a delicious surprise let me tell YOU! Because you guys all know I’m all about the moomins, especially selfish Little My and creative Snufkin. Noah was expecting to be bored the whole time but ended up having fun playing games with the grown-ups. He can’t stop talking about it today — he has to keep reliving his charade challenge having to act out “Pebbles.” (He did this by trying to act out “rebels” and it’s a testimony to the creativity of the guests that several people actually guessed this!)

We never but never go out on New Year’s because we are not raucous party types and plus we like to keep our kids around so we were excited to get an invite that we could actually manage and that sounded fun.

I think my favorite thing in the last year has been branching out in my social life so being at a new year’s party where we knew no one and having a great time was a nice way to end last year and begin this one.

I think we’re going to have to have the hosts for dinner soon because we had such a grand time!!!