Anne Lamott on process

I think this is a wonderful metaphor for the creative process from one of my favorite writers and favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird:

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't--and, in fact, you're not supposed to--know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing. First you just point at what has your attention and take the picture. In the last chapter, for instance, what had my attention were the contents of my lunch bag. But as the picture developed, I found I had a really clear image of the boy against the fence. Or maybe your Polaroid was supposed to be a picture of that boy against the fence, and you didn't notice until the last minute that a family was standing a few feet away from him. Now, maybe it's his family, or the family of one of the kids in his class, but at any rate these people are going to be in the photograph, too. Then the film emerges from the camera with a grayish green murkiness that gradually becomes clearer and clearer, and finally you see the husband and wife holding their baby with two children standing beside them. And at first it all seems very sweet, but then the shadows begin to appear, and then you start to see the animal tragedy, the baboons baring their teeth. And then you see a flash of bright red flowers in the bottom left quadrant that you didn't even know were in the picture when you took it, and these flowers evoke a time or a memory that moves you mysteriously. And finally, as the portrait comes into focus, you begin to notice all the props surrounding these people, and you begin to understand how props define us and comfort us, and show us what we value and what we need, and who we think we are.

The Occasional Short Piece Dept.: The Springs of Weeki Wachee

In the winter, my mother would pile me and my sister into one of those huge, bulbous cars of the fifties and drive us from Tennessee to Florida. We’d sit in the back and count cows until one person got to 500 or the other person gave up.

Once in Florida, we’d pull into a parkway rest stop and get a free glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed. Tasting oj under palm trees opened me up to the idea that there were exotic pleasures in the world and maybe if I went far enough in a big enough car, I'd find them.

Sure enough, it happened. At Weeki Wachee Springs, north of Tampa, after miles of cows, I suddenly found myself in the presence of mermaids. They would gloriously flap around with fish and manatees and seemingly operate without air for whole stretches of time. I was completely stunned and mesmerized.

In Delray Beach, we’d stay in my grandparents house near the intra-coastal canal. I loved the thick, scented air of South Florida, the sail boats on the blue water, the porches covered up with flowering plants, the palm tree at the back of the house which ran along the ground so you could walk up its trunk.

My dad would come down, at some point, and explain something about the canal and how far it went up the coast and how you could sail down it.

I wandered the sides of the canal, dreaming about boarding a schooner and heading out into open sea. Maybe I would wind up in Africa, where snakes hung from trees among mysterious shrieks and mutterings. Maybe there were real mermaids out there, like the ones I had seen at Weeki Wachee, and they’d come up to young men and guide them up remote rivers.

I have almost no memory of the rest of my life back home. I don’t recall grade school teachers or what we studied. There was only the Lone Ranger at six o’clock, my hill, the field down by the creek which would later become a Little League Park, the girl next door who was two years older.

Without the amazing taste of fresh orange juice, the blue of the canal, the red of bougainvillea, the green of the mermaid tails, it’s entirely possible that my life would have never left the gray scale of the Eisenhower years in Tennessee.

On the other hand, who knows if I would have followed the tides of my curiosity about everything, if I would have fallen in love with mountains and forests and seas, had I never seen the mermaids of Wicki Wachee.

(Post Script: From time to time a threatened species, the Weeki Wachee swimmers still perform twice a day at the park’s underwater theater. The water temperature is 72 degrees.)

The Headwaters Gathering at Warren Wilson

Southern Appalachia at the Crossroads

From Warren Wilson's release: Hosted by Warren Wilson, The Wilderness Society, and Orion Magazine, Headwaters Gathering will speak to the challenges climate change poses for life in Southern Appalachia and create a call for action. Keynote speaker Herman Daly, along with Majora Carter, Winona LaDuke, retired coal miner Chuck Nelson of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, David Orr, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center scientist and lead author on the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Dr. Thomas Peterson, Janisse Ray, The New York Times DOT EARTH's Andrew Revkin, and National Wildlife Federation President and CEO Larry Schweiger will engage us in working across divides, galvanizing our concerns, and strategizing for change. From a town meeting, convened by a panel of experts, to compelling whole-group sessions, and a writer's intensive, we will find our collective voice. Friday night's session is free and open to the public but pre-registration is required. Visit www.headwatersgathering.org soon for information and registration.

The story: Coming around full circle (again)

From an earlier blog:

I started my career as a journalist, working for a daily newspaper that covered the coal counties of Southwest Virginia. A few weeks after I joined the paper, fresh from journalism school, I made a routine call to the sheriff's department in a mountainous county. A deputy there said, “Well, there is one thing that happened,” then proceeded to tell me about a fire in a remote valley in which three children burned to death. He referred me to a social worker who knew the family. Apparently a single mother had left her home to gather in water from a nearby well when the house erupted in flames from an over-turned kerosene lantern. It was a small frame cottage and it went up like dried moss. All the mother could do, the social worker said, was stand at the window and scream for her children.

The story means more to me today than it did when I wrote it. Then it was news and a pat on the back. Now there’s something unforgettable in its retelling.

I spent about three years as a journalist; some of that time writing about troop exercises on the Czech border and how to navigate the bahnhof as an Army writer in Germany.

Once back in the states, I took a job in advertising--as a copywriter--veering off from straight reporting.

I soon discovered that creative work, the craft of it, pretty much boiled down to beseeching the universe for a concept. Even so, it generally spun around the retelling of a human experience; around some form of story that triggered a response--wonder, maybe, or dismay, or curiosity. In other words, the best work, as I saw it, even in the micro-world of a :30 commercial, once again had to do with story.

When the nineties drew to a close, the world I knew began to shift. Less advertising, more work involving longer pieces; more web work, more brochures, more magazine development (in print and on-line), more portraits of causes and institutions.

Now I’m part of another sea change: blogging as a planetary phenomenon. As a communicator, I love the idea of it and I’m crazy about the form. Here’s why:

• It’s fast. You can get a blog out as quickly as an email; okay, it can be an email—to virtually any constituency you want to clump together in a working list-serve, whether for yourself, a social change organization, small business or non-profit.

• It’s flexible. You can totally tailor what you want to say to fit and resonate with anyone in the known world

• It has an inherent viral quality. And can be passed along willy-nilly or purposefully across vast social networks

• You can marry all the strategic, conceptual and visual impact of advertising with the intimacy of a diary and/or the news-worthy and linear qualities of good reporting

• And, finally, it’s a great medium for telling stories--long or short stories, rambling or to the point, epic or not, the stuff of good journalism, good advertising and good memory.

Looking back, I feel like I’ve come a long way from the nervous chat I had with a social worker in Ft. Blackmore, Virginia, thirty-five years ago. But I’ve also come all the way back around to that very starting place. Back to the importance of a critical piece of information, well-told, delivered in a timely manner, then retold and passed along (sometimes with great rapidity) person to person, story to story to story to story until it’s embedded in the social fabric and the history of our time, and a part of the human experience.

I'm so glad to find sanity

Thank you Seth Godin (from a recent blog):

The Super Bowl hype is blissfully long gone, and lazy media outlets can no longer reprint press releases and dissect multi-million dollar wastes of time and money.

The lesson of these ads is simple. Putting on a show is expensive, time-consuming and quite fun. And it rarely works.

The Gatorade commercial, or the guy clipping his toenails or someone throwing a rock through a vending machine... it's all show biz, it's not marketing.

Marketing is telling a story that sticks, that spreads and that changes the way people act. The story you tell is far more important than the way you tell it. Don't worry so much about being cool, and worry a lot more about resonating your story with my worldview. If you don't have a story, then a great show isn't going to help much.

(And yes, every successful organization has a story, even if they've never considered running an ad, during the Super Bowl or anywhere else.)