Month: March 2016

Arizona vs Florida: Cold weather getaway showdown

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Yellow tulips

Unrelated: The springtime yellow tulips recently gifted to us by an uber-kind houseguest!

Winter’s basically over, so the time is ripe to look back at this past season’s getaway trips and, because this is America, crown a WINNER.

Let’s start with Arizona, where I went in January to visit my friend Elena who was interning at the blissed-out Tree of Life Center in the teensy town of Patagonia.

IMG_1987

Elena chillin’ on the plateau

She showed me around the farm’s sprout house (where tubs of little seedlings are each identified by a name like “Surrender” or “Forgiveness” written in marker on one side), brought me to dinner at a pizza restaurant called Velvet Elvis, and helmed many a scenic drive—from Phoenix to Tucson to the border town of Nogales and many stops in between. My favorite part might have been the evening when we set up lawn chairs on a hillside to watch the sun set, then turned them around to watch the moon rise.

I took so many awesome pictures (if I do say so myself) in this spellbinding locale that it’s hard to pick, but here’s a wee selection:

Moon rise
Bakin’ in the sun
Together at last
A trip down Purification Lane
Surprise!
Diet of choice in this town

Turning our attention next to Florida… Arthur and I flew to Ft. Meyers last week to visit his mom and stepdad, who have wisely started leaving Boston each March to weather the bitter ends of the Northeast winter in these more hospitable climes.

While the area’s sprawling tic-tac developments and endless six-lane highways were not a draw for any of us, there are innumerable awesome animals and plants all around, and we spent much of our time hunting them down (with our eyes!). Plus of course many hours were spent in fine company simply relaxing and chatting, and sometimes enjoying a little media accompaniment, such as Rivers and Tides, the enchanting movie about artist Andy Goldsworthy.

Lilipads (duh)
The iconic vacation house
Mangrove!
At Leoma Lovegrove Gallery & Gardens

So what do you think, dear audience? Which winter getaway vacation wins?

Cast your votes—the chosen city will win a prize!!

Behind burqas, more than bodies

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I first became acquainted with the righteous, personable, accomplished (and stylish!) Grace Aneiza Ali when she wrote a guest post for the blog Idealists in Action, which I was co-editing at the time with one of the great platonic loves of my life, Celeste Hamilton Dennis.

To put my introduction to Grace in context, I should begin by saying, perhaps quizzically, that I don’t read too awfully much on the internet. I mean read-read. For sure, I look at the news, I peruse my neighborhood listserv, and I click over when I see an acquaintance has a new job. But—though it’s not a point of pride—after staring at the screen all day in the service of most of my work and life tasks, I don’t usually feel I have the energy to sit down with it for even longer when I actually want to read. (For this, I turn to paper books and magazines.) The loss is all mine, I know!

But occasionally, something does first catch my eye, then keep my attention, then resonate with me enough afterward that I keep a link to it in my “favorites” doc, look for ways to share it, and sometimes even read it again. Grace’s story for Idealist, “Do we miscast rural communities as places to leave behind?” was one such piece.

Grace Aneiza Ali and Celeste Hamilton Dennis

Grace + Celeste (photo by Terrence Jennings)

Grace caught my eye again a while later when I saw her in the New York Times‘ Sunday Routine, and then a third time (the charm?) just last week in NYC. The occasion was the event The Art of the Burqa, produced by the art-meets-activism magazine Grace founded, OF NOTE, and hosted by Pen + Brush (“the only international nonprofit organization offering an outlet for women in both the literary and visual arts in the city of New York”) with help from the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

Through the fortitude of their mutual awesomeness, Grace and Celeste have stayed in touch since the Idealist days, and Celeste recently became Editor of OF NOTE, which was pretty thrilling news for me. (And here I’d been thinking that ’90s Hillary and Bill were the world’s most iconic two-for-the-price-of-one!) Naturally, I high-tailed it to Gramercy/Flatiron for the event, and spent the afternoon feeling more enlightened by the minute.

Highlights for me included the conversation between Suzanne Russell—an extremely badass lawyer, writer, and visual artist—and Afghan artist Hangama Amiri about the latter’s portrait series that features her burqa-clad mother inhabiting a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces; and the multimedia artist, educator, and writer Gia Harewood on the artist Behnaz Babazadeh’s Burkaphilia project—especially this wild video. But all the afternoon’s segments went a good distance toward illuminating the meanings and impacts of this iconic garment that extend far beyond the cloth itself and the body it covers.

It’s hard to picture a better event than one that combines a visit with beloved friends and mentors and a timely and affecting program—all in a beautiful space with a rapt audience. So my hat’s off to all of you! I look forward to only more greatness.

Hoping to publish? [stifled laughter]

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A couple of weeks ago, my friend Andy and I attended a (free!) Social Media Week New York event called “Hoping To Publish? An Agent, Author, Marketing Director and Publisher on what to expect and the questions to ask, in the Trade or Self-Publishing Worlds.”

Social Media Week

As you may recall from a previous post on this blog (one that featured a big creepy portrait of Kyle MacLachlan), Andy wrote a book many years ago, I edited it last year, and now we’re both wondering where the story goes from here.

We were hopeful that “Hoping To Publish?” would shed some light on our options, and indeed it did. Here are my top takeaways:

  • The world of book publishing is every bit as complicated and nuanced as the worlds of professional sports management, Japanese lacquer painting, or geopolitics, and the pros on this panel—who included a 40-year veteran of major publishing houses; an award-winning five-time novelist; and a longtime, seen-it-all literary agent—clearly spent much of their lives learning the ropes. (I should add that these are the ever-changing kind of ropes, which makes learning them that much harder.) This is not a space for the faint of heart or lazy of habit!
  • Generally, while the film and music industries have embraced “indie” production, bookish tastemakers do still tend to cast a pall on authors who self-publish memoirs and works of literary fiction—though writers of genre fiction seem able to avoid this stigma and can often do pretty well for themselves, both financially and socially. The panel agreed this construct will probably not last, that the literary elite will eventually fall in line with the rest of the media at some point, but for now, most of the speakers cautioned that self-publishing outside of categories like science fiction and erotica can amount to career suicide.
  • It’s really hard to get published. One speaker joked that, in the ’90s, when she was trying to get her first book published, everyone and his brother had a book deal—her coworkers all had book deals, the guy she sat down next to on the bus had a book deal. But in our post-crash (and nearly post-bookstore) world, it’s a tougher go for all.
Sad face

Example of a sad face (courtesy Flickr user kokopelli1330)

Yes, in all, it was kind of a bummer. But the panel did also take care to mention some silver linings:

  • Authors today can play a much greater role in the success of their books by working themselves to pump up their following via social media;
  • If your goal is to just to produce a physical object of your work for funsies or posterity (rather than to make a career of being an author), self-publishing is a cure-all godsend no matter your genre;
  • If you love to write, you should try not to get discouraged and keep writing no matter the publishing landscape. Because, at the end of the day, aren’t we all just writing because we love to?
I Love You hand

See? This guy just loves to write! (courtesy Flickr user Summer)

In our case, since Andy’s novel falls in the genre fiction part of the spectrum, we’re thinking that self-publishing could be a good way to go with her book. At the least, we’ll have an awesome book-baby we can hold in our arms and pass around to our friends, and if the stars align, she might make 50 or 100 bucks and get trolled on the internet by some nerds!

Dear readers: Anyone want to chip in their two cents on this behemoth topic?