I’ve discovered that my friend Colleen Bradford Krantz and her colleague, Paul Kakert (who is from my hometown!) have had their documentary film, Train to Nowhere, nominated for a regional Emmy.

I’m so proud of them, but not really for the recognition from the awards people. More than that, I am proud of Colleen and Paul for all the hard work they did to to tell the story of these forgotten immigrants.

I think sometimes it is easy to imagine dead things as just that — things. As if somehow, the moment something dies, all its history and humanity goes with it.

Today, Isaiah asked me:

“Mom when we die, do our bodies explode?”

I said: “No, our bodies decompose. That’s like what happens to the food bits we put in the compost.”

“So, we rot?” he asked, not particularly freaked out.

“Yes, kind of. Our bodies break down and turn to back to dirt, like the food in the compost does,” I said. “But the important part of us, our soul, that’s the REAL us. It isn’t in our bodies. It leaves our body when we die.”

“What happens to that?”

I explained to him that we don’t really know. I gave him the short list of  possibilities: Heaven, reincarnation, and just stopping.

“I choose reincarnation. I’d like to be a bear or something,” he said. “Or a baby again.”

What was inside the railcar was just the explosion of those 11 lives. It was just the thing we see after death.

What was missing was all stories of the human lives that reminded us they were not just things, but people.

The soul is a string of memories, in some ways, a compilation of the thousand kindnesses we do, the funny things we say to our parents when we were 6. Our quirks and our passionate entanglements.

Decomposed immigrant skeletons in a rail car once knew mighty love too.

Colleen and Paul did good work — in the book and the film — reminding us that all the little tragedies that flash by us in the news and in life are their own kind of tragedy … because of the beautiful humanity they hold within them. Millions of stories heaving to be heard.

Each is a story holding all the dreams and heartbeats of someone.

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1. A Friend of Mine

From my “For Writers, By Writers” Series

I bow deeply to pro-bloggers who keep the art of blogging closest to its journaling roots.

My favorite pro-blogger is the erasible “Pioneer Woman,” Ree Drummond.

Here are the five reasons why “Pioneer Woman” swallows entire mornings.

1. Personal. It’s the way that blogs are intended. Ree slathers her life all over the pages, including her otherwise quiet husband, her son’s inability to say “juice bag,” (think letter ‘d’) and her basset, Charlie. Why should we care about this woman and her family?

We shouldn’t except that she’s…

2. Funny. Remember “The Carol Burnett Show”? (No? If not, watch this sometime!)

Ree channels the smart humor that Carol brought to her own universe.

Nothing too rich, or too heavy.

Nothing rude (well, a belch here and there, ok?) Just the sort of ticklish joy that comes with everyday life.

It isn’t all chuckle-chuckle. Ree’s been known to douse readers in tears and share her heartbreaks too.

She lays it bare, showing the tippy balance of working life, one where Mom is teaching and taking a million photos and baking and posing for magazines and chasing dogs and keeping Dad happy and also just trying to be like “normal,” whatever that is.

3. Images. The best blog post I have read in a long time — anywhere — Ree showed how she put together her children’s book, featuring basset Charlie.

It got over 700 comments. Her average is in the 100+ comment range, FYI.

The key to this post was combining short burst of text with Ree’s images, both of Charlie, and of the book making process.

Her eye is sharp, and she does not skimp on the number of images in her posts. This kind of “writing” truly keys into the changing desires of her reading public.

4. “Organized”. When you hit Ree’s home page, your eyes dart from here to there. What to eat –er, read! — first?

Menu titles and features jump out at you, and when you follow, you find each rich in content, compelling with a single word.

This is done with fewer menus (seven only with straight-forward titles like “Confessions” and “Homeschooling” and “Cooking”) and lots-o submenus.

However, that’s not where the key organization comes in. Look at a recipe page and just look at the beautiful, organized clutter of this page! You immediately get a sense of what it must be like to live in Ree’s house and to search for cumin in her pantry.

I can’t find it, but who cares!  Let’s make brownies!

It is PACKED with color and choices: images and links and hooks to stories, to recent recipes at the top, an photo of her and link to about page, a box that links to ALL of the recipes.

As you scroll down the post, you are enticed by widgets featuring “16-Minute Meals,” “Cowboy Food,” “Cowgirl Food” and more.

“Pioneer Woman” is a vortex of compelling content.

5. Niche-plus. To launch themselves into the universe of “not just blogger,” bloggers hear all the time that we need to connect with a certain audience, using SEO optimization and keyword content.

All this is fancy way of saying: how do we use the blog to say the one or two things we are really good at saying?

I want to ask Ree sometime how she started… maybe with homeschooling and cooking?

Those do seem to be important niche areas that draw online audiences. But it’s clear to see she’s bounded into writing, photography, and style blogging too. Not to mention the meta-content of her blog that makes it so perfect: family.

But Ree’s blog is truly successful because it isn’t TOO niche. The blog seems to overflow with her creative life, and throb with all the things she has to share with the world.

Not the least of which are her son’s inability to say “juice bag”.

Who is your favorite blogger? I’d love to hear so I can check her or him out!

*****

Want to follow Ree on Twitter? She’s super.

How ’bout her adorable book about Charlie? Click the picture over there!!

*****

How does your audience read your blog? Wanna know? Check this out!

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I listen to The Moth podcast because it almost never fails to make my whole spirit roil with tittering champagne bubbles of hilarity. I don’t guffaw out loud, mind you. It’s just that frothy happiness that fills me up — not unlike the pool scene in Peter Sellers’ classis, The Party.

Today I listened to satirist Tony Hendra’s recent podcast about his time at a monastery and the monk who changed the way he lived. Although it wasn’t really all that “funny,” the craft of the story made me remember why I love The Moth: the combination of real voices conveying vivid chunks of their life makes such compelling listening.

In the case of this podcast, Hendra uses fantastically subtle juxtaposition — of pedophilia and satire, ironically — to tell a beautiful story about peace.

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The Supple Unconscious Mind

On Morning Edition this morning, Tina Brown recommended a New Yorker article: “The Social Animal” by David Brooks, on revelations in the science of our human nature.

It’s such a “social” time for us. I mean, we are all tweetering about, texting and sexting, making friends, then unfriending, checking in and linking in.

Some of us are even being stoically “anti-social,” choosing NOT be a part of the techno-social world, and doing extreme things like going to Bingo games, coaching soccer, and calling people on rotary phones.

Whatever choices we are making, all of this socializing is eating up our time and energy. All our spare energy goes into “achieving”– in our careers, in our yoga classes, in our diets, and our Angry Birds.

In “The Social Animal,” David Brooks is exploring the social aspect of our culture and wants you to know that “we are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness.” Have you noticed?

Scientists right now are making breakthroughs that will help us make sense of this chaotic life.

“A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment.

“But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

– from “The Social Animal” by David Brooks in the New Yorker. Read more here.

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A Guest Post in Which New Haven Graphic Designer Jessica Ferguson Reveals Her “Blog Problem”

“Most people are just afraid of putting pencil to paper.” That’s how one of my favorite art teachers started his “Introduction to Drawing” course.

“When you’re a kid, you don’t care – you’ll draw anything on any surface you can get away with. You just draw. But now, I can tell you’re afraid – you’re terrified to make that first mark. You need to just do it, just draw!”

And I was afraid. Terrified actually. It sounds silly, but that first mark was so important: it was where you started. There was no going back. You could make or break a drawing with that first mark. It was a commitment, once you did it, that mark would be out there for the world to see… and what if it turned out I had no drawing skills? Putting pencil to paper felt a lot like jumping off a cliff.

Blogging into the Abyss

Blogging feels the same way to me. I love the idea of it – expressing myself out there on the web. I’m a born attention whore you see. My Facebook wall teems with updates, links, comments on my life and photos from my iPhone. I never think twice about throwing something up there – it feels so casual, so relaxed. I know people judge me from time to time (the term “morally questionable” was thrown about at one point in reference to a post), and I welcome the critiques. If you don’t like it – unfriend me. Or I’ll unfriend you. Let’s race to see who can click “unfriend” first! Facebook is easy!

But blogging is different.

Blogs aren’t just for your friends, nosy little buggers that they are. Blogs are for strangers who don’t care what your husband cooked you for dinner. They don’t care what cute thing the cat did last night or if you’ll be at the bar, “just in case anyone wants to show up.”

And blogs filled with links to cool shit better be filled to the brim with the coolest of shit, because otherwise they’re a dime a dozen.

I should know, I have several. Oh yes, I’ve done my share of blogging. Let’s see…

Stringing Them Along

There was my first blog.

Quite a few years ago when blogspot started making it easy for any Tom, Dick or Harry to toss their thoughts out onto the web. I started as many do, with a massive manifesto post – filled with tidbits about WHO I AM and IMPORTANT BELIEFS and WHAT I WILL BLOG ABOUT. It was self-important and grandiose. It was everything I wanted my blog to be. I WAS A BLOGGER!

And then the fear set in. I had the shocking realization that I don’t really have much to blog about. It was less of a venue for my important and well-thought-out views on life and more of a random journal. Sort of embarrassing really – especially since this was before the days of FB and sharing everything from how you slept last night to what you had for dinner seemed normal. Back then it just seemed silly to make those things public. My blog died a slow death over several months until I eventually shut it down for good, kicked some dirt over in and moved on as though it had never happened.

My second blog, was different. It had a point!

It was to be A CRAFT BLOG: chiefly about my own craft projects (mainly quilting) but also about a few choice crafts other people had done – and tutorials/patterns for those.

I skipped the manifesto this time and went straight to work; I’d learned my lesson about setting unachievable goals. THIS is what I was working on yesterday. And THIS is my project tonight. HERE are some amazing photos of a new fabric and HERE they are in my quilt! It was beautiful – a work of art in its own right. But then I ran out of projects – I only have so much time to craft after all. So I started sharing more and more projects from the web. I’m a craft-blog addict – so there was never any shortage of amazing things I could share from them. I used the blog as a sort of “to-do” list, blogging about all the craft projects I planned to try myself. But somehow, I never got around to them. They faded into the back of my mind and the bottom of my blog as I posted more and more. My comments became more sparse with each post as I grew tired of using the same words, “Gorgeous!” “Isn’t this beautiful?!” “I love this!”… I just didn’t have anything else to say.

And eventually the pointlessness of the project became apparent. The people reading my blog were likely the same people reading the blogs I was reading. I wasn’t creating anymore: I was simply regurgitating images with pathetic and interchangeable comments attached to them.

Third Time’s a What?

This time I didn’t kill the blog. I started a new one. I transitioned from one to another by putting up a post on the old one saying that I was starting new, starting clean. I had a new purpose & a new focus. It was no longer going to be a craft blog – but now A DESIGN BLOG.

In recent months I’d been blurring the lines anyway – posting typography links that got me excited, links to well-designed webpages & fliers. It was time to refocus.

The first post? Back to the much-loved manifesto. This one focused on the need for designers & artists to keep a journal – and this would be mine! Eleven posts later – the blog went silent. My own expectations were too high. Everything I thought to post seemed wrong, not enough, not focused enough, not enough to say about it. And there it sits gathering dust. I even still have a standard link to in my email signature – though most of the time I manually delete it before hitting send, out of embarrassment of making my failure public.

No surprise: I love blogs. My Google blog reader has me subscribed to 196 blogs, and I read through them almost daily. Mostly I look for cool links, images or projects. I share a ton of these on my Facebook page, where I have no fear. I look up to bloggers – mostly women– who find the time to put their thoughts down on the page. They make me laugh, they make me cry. They feel like friends. I want to be one of them. I want to join their club. I want people like them to be moved & inspired by MY words the page.

What Now You Ask?

So now I’m starting my own business. And I really should be blogging. Its almost a necessity, but the business aspect makes the whole thing even more stressful. Potential clients will be judging me. I need to seem professional and educated in my field. I need to find something interesting to say. I need to blog with some frequency. I need to find the courage jump again.

I think my problem is that I expect too much of my blogs. I expect them to change me. To change my life, my goals. To make me focus, when nothing in my life is focused.

In short, I want my blogs to make me the kind of person who should be blogging. But I’m not really sure what kind of person that is, and I’m even more unsure that the person is me.

As for the pencil to paper dilemma? I did it. I jumped. I think the first time I may have even done it with my eyes closed, my breath held – but I did it. I drew a bike.

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#reverb10 Day 7

Prompt: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? (Thanks, Cali Harris).

You know what is funny? The Muppets covering Queen.

You know what else is funny? Crossword puzzles.

Here’s something else: transvestite tips from Paul.

These may seem random, but they are all bites of joy from my Facebook Wall.

I have friends there, too. of course. They are the purveyors of some of the best content I see daily. Some  are so witty I can hardly believe it. Facebook condenses their brilliance, talent and their humanity into a thick and addictive stew.

The Tweet-Leap

So 2010 was the year I deepened my relationship with others through the hallowed veins of Facebook. I enjoy it a lot.

But my good friend and executive expert Robyn Greenspan whispered to me sometime last spring that –OOPS! — I had it all wrong. Facebook was OK for Farmville and posting pics to friends and such, but all the cool kids had already started a more enduring relationship with you-know-tweet.

Robyn chirped up about this during one of my Facebook rants about being clueless about Twitter. I didn’t understand why people loved Twitter SO much. A hashtag was mincemeat to me. I wasn’t a complete Twitter Luddite; I had an account and occasional twirped (once a week???), but I didn’t see the point.

Her announcement devastated me. Even though she reassured me that Facebook wasn’t dead, it only meant that I had to keep on pushing my learning envelope. How could I be so wrong? And what was so bad with Muppets and crossword and Farmville and transvestites?

Organized Noise

I used to really love that “Hooked on Classics” album when I was young… Remember that? It was “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and other beautiful classical music, with a synthesized back beat. It seemed to so cool, so right, so amazingly up-to-date. When I was 11.

I heard it again, recently, and cringed. Let’s all get down to “Trumpet Voluntary”? Hmmm, maybe not.

Once the method to Twitter revealed itself to me (Thanks TweetDeck!), I started to see Facebook more like “Hooked on Classics.” It had its time and value, but that backbeat was not ever going to reinvent the perfect classic.

Before we misunderstand each other, I’m not saying Twitter is the perfect classic… actually I am saying that FRIENDSHIP and connecting with people is the baseline. All these tools we use are just one  way or another to put ourselves in the path of opportunity, experience, and ultimately, love.

So, I believe they both have their place. Twitter’s viral hashtag invention is excellent at pulling off something that creates “community” — like #reverb10 . Better than the linear commenting and sharing system on Facebook.

Facebook’s appeal is keeping me tight with those I am already tight with; letting me hold them up to the light like a prism, whenever they offer themselves. It also let’s me spill my guts more freely than I can in person and in a more private way (just friends, please!).

And then shake it off with a bit of idiotic Youtube-ed-ness.

One thing I do love about Twitter is the here and gone-ish-ness of it. To me, it is a massive carnival fun house: around every corner are more and more giggling strangers in funny hats holding snow cones. They are all peering at themselves in bent and twisted mirrors and saying: “Haha! Look at me! Come here! Look at us!”

Sometimes you connect and other times you just move on. That’s a party and I want to be there.

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1. Don’t Make Me Look: Writing, Scorned.

Yeah it’s now 2:30 and I HAVE been awake since 7 a.m. and yes I HAVE thought about this Day 2, #Reverb10 prompt and I suppose I HAVE had at least TWO chances already to write this post, but I HAVEN’T and whose fault is that I’d like to ask but I won’t because if I do, some kind of disgusting acidic guilt will start eating away my writerly guts and then, because I HAVEN’T written the post yet, I’ll do something even MORE stupid, like TWEET 20 times and let  “it only takes a few seconds to write a tweet” flash like a “girls-girls-girls” neon sign in my mind until I am lulled, happily, into the Twitter-sphere, and OH SHIT, I haven’t even LOOKED at Facebook yet today, which means that hundreds of my adoring crickets are chirping away in my absence.

And oh, look.

It’s 2:41.

Huh.

And NOW I HAVE written the post and THAT wasn’t so hard, and NOW I feel badly AGAIN because wasn’t it just plain RIDICULOUS to put it off for so LONG, something which only took 11 minutes?

“Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?”

This post is part of a daily writing project called #reverb10. Find out more & join in this creative exercise here.

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1. The Word for the Year: Denial

A Guest Post by Karin Kuczynski-Holmgren

It’s a small cottage on the water in Bridgeport, Conn., a peaceful setting despite the overgrown parking lot and chainlink fence that surrounds it.

Just beyond the rows of parked Hondas and Priuses, the harbor twinkles with reflected factory lights. This vegetarian restaurant is called Bloodroot, run by a collective of women, and I haven’t been here since high school, with a Ms magazine and a paperback collection of essays by Dworkin, Faludi, Steinem, Pagila, Roiphe in my backpack.

In 15 years, the décor hasn’t changed. The cobwebs in the rafters  look familiar.  Gathered around the table, this could be a staging ground for revolution, political intrigue, or at the very least, serious conversation. Shelves in the bookstore reveal a specialty niche: feminist, new age, multiculturalism, gender studies.

No filler music. The windows are open to let in the autumn sounds and breezes.

Small groups of people sit together under the beamed ceiling, grasping hands across the table, sipping water or wine. A  gray-braided sprite greets us at the door and takes our order. Menus are handwritten on the walls; you need to walk the floor to decide what to order.

“No waitresses,” the owner says. “Just listen for your order to be called. ”

And bus your own table. Women may cook here, but there’s no serving. We order– escarole soup, green salad, and a local pinot grigio– then pay, cash preferred. We spot our friend, Annie – leaving soon for California – and join her, wishing for her career in acupuncture.

Portraits of women look out from the walls in black and whites or sepia tones. They gaze straight and determined into the camera, carved jawlines and a weariness around their eyes. You see that photographs taken when work lasted sun-up to sundown. At Bloodroot, customers are strengthened by its sense of community, built on the backs of these women, and fortified by a whole, vegetarian meal.

Work Done, and Not Done

The kitchen workers talk over quinoa, butternut squash, and farm-to-table salad on mismatched plates. They were all over 50 years old. How much has changed in the socio-political space for women since this place opened? Did this tiny restaurant influence their lives, the lives of their loves ones, the local political climate? Surely, they could measure the changes – in milestone laws, events and even in the crowd of customers on a Wednesday night. How did their opinions change with time?

Here sits the old guard, original revolutionaries and their stew. What are they thinking? Are they uplifted by Connecticut’s civil union passage? Did they cheer when women governors were elected? Now women surpass men in sheer numbers at undergraduate colleges. Girl Power succeeded against Raising Cain, right?

The women seemed subdued.

My thoughts turn to my friends at the table. Out of the group, only 4 of us were under 35. The rest, older. I didn’t see any young people in this restaurant. Did they know about this place? Did it not interest them, with the odd location and old school feel? They have no Facebook page or Twitter account;  just a barebones, 90’s-style website. They aren’t working to attract a younger crowd. And frankly neither is Feminism The Concept.

Old School Feminism has given me and my generation choices. Many choices. Overwhelming choices – from education to career, to have children or not, to choose and union with any partner. To rise up, sometimes only to a glass ceiling, but slowly, slowly, it’s changing.

But what is Feminism The Concept today? Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Hill. Are these the modern feminists and role models? Who are the modern feminists?

Old school feminists complain that modern women and young girls have forgotten the hard work and efforts of the prior generation to lift us up from the Mad Men working world. We don’t pay due homage when we wear belly-baring shirts and Jimmy Choos. They expected not only gratefulness, but someone to take the torch and carry on.

Is there anyone to do this?

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I’ve fallen in lust with Hipstamatic on my iPhone … All made possible because the iPhone 4 has a decent camera.

Hipstamatic is the app that allows previously young people like me (who refuse to believe that status has changed) to believe that we can still be the great photographer we dreamed of being when we were 16, and toying with instatmatic cameras.

This dream, like many I had suffered the loss of, is fading and lovely in its dusty frame. Only the best qualities are apparent, and for some reason, the skewed composition and disorganized groupings makes the dream seem more human. More like real art.

Which is to say it is like most art: everyday, dime-a-dozen perfection, carved from our leaden souls.

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I’ve been reading the article “All Joy and No Fun” from the New York Times Magazine with interest.

I’m in a position to speak about the “joys” (or otherwise) of parenthood now that I’ve been in the thick of it for 16 months.

Anyone who knows me can attest that I haven’t always been a happy girl. I inherited mild chronic depression from my dad’s side of the family. I’m also somewhat of a complainer, like him.

The flip side of that is I acquired my artful mind from him, and the ability to look back with rose-colored glasses. The deep, sweet places that my mind travels are intricately woven with the threads of loneliness and occasional discontent that cling to me like a stray dog.

I worried about these qualities in the lead up to our choice to foster kids. Would I spiral down, and take them with me?

From the article: “When you pause to think what children mean to you, of course they make you feel good,” says Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. “The problem is, 95 percent of the time, you’re not thinking about what they mean to you. You’re thinking that you have to take them to piano lessons. So you have to think about which kind of happiness you’ll be consuming most often. Do you want to maximize the one you experience almost all the time”—moment-to-moment happiness—“or the one you experience rarely?”

So the distinct ability to look at the kids for what they represent — beauty, truth, innocence, family — allows us as parents to have the “joy” of parenting and achieve happiness. But a large portion of the time we are living in the function of parenting: the logistics of making life-with-kids happen, from laundry to school to birds and bees.

The curious notions put forth in this long article (please read it because it is very interesting) is that American parents are less happy because we want MORE for our kids. The more details of our kids’ lives we have to worry about, the less our kids make us happy.

What I Mean
Yesterday, I was sitting in a lawn chair watching the kids jump around in the kiddie pool. I had a book on my lap that I wasn’t really reading. The kids weren’t paying any attention to me. I was just sitting there, hanging out.

For a moment, I heard myself worrying: “I should have invited some other kids over. I should have organized a playdate. They are always playing by themselves at home. They aren’t socializing.”

Then I caught myself. My train of thought was interrupted by two things: the ever-pragmatic voice of my mom in my head repeating over and over: KIDS ARE HAPPIEST AT HOME. That, and the tumbling peals of their laughter in the pool.

They were happy. But where are Mom and Dad happiest?

One of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson, wrote the book The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a funny memoir of his childhood in Iowa in the 50s. Actually it is funny, but it’s also quite bitter. Bryson clings desperately to his memories, and bemoans the loss of the simpler life that children had “back then.” Reading it, I felt an uncontrollable regret. I grew up with a similar childhood in the 70s, riding my bike to the library, walking to school, unencumbered by playdates. But every parent today seems to cling to the notion that we are NOT safe anymore. That children must be sheltered, protected, coddled. The parents lose their own time (they have LESS free time now than they did back in the 70s) and the children learn to cling, to be afraid.

What Memories May Come
My mom, who raised 6 kids before she went back to work teaching, doesn’t commemorate my childhood the same way. She was GLAD when Dad got home so she could thrust a baby in his arms. They argued the same way Colin and I do about who carried the biggest burden of “work.”

Yet, in the same way, my mom oozes with joy over her family. She tells me she would “never trade it, not a day of it.” Her sister, Mary Ann, recently deceased, had 13 children. Mom always said Mary Ann would have had more if she could.

For me, the year past has been the happiest of my life: but also the most complex and wearying. Every morning, we go through boring/grueling routines of reminders, repetition, and a great deal of talking about pee. But I see living examples of what we achieve as we have stuck to our beliefs, values and goals.

They smile at us, say thank you, and give us the very best hugs.

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