Friday Five

1. Can I get a witness? Last Thursday, I had the honor and privilege of being a witness at very special nuptials. Many of you know Kathy from Reinventing the Event Horizon and her partner Sara. Kathy had emailed to let me know that prior to their big move to Cuenca, Ecuador, she and Sara would be in New York City. She wanted to know if I’d be available to come to the clerk’s office and be a witness at their wedding ceremony. Would I be available?!? You betcha!

My co-witness was the fabulously awesome Virginia from Lame Adventures. Check out her post of the event for more details and (in focus) photos. Virginia and I had a lot of important duties, including, but not limited to, signing our names to Serious Paperwork, loudly saying “no” when asked if we knew of any reason why Kathy and Sara should not be married, and holding the ticket with their ceremony number on it. I think we handled them all with aplomb, if I do say so myself.

Kathy and Sara: Newlyweds

Upon exiting the building, we stopped to have the official wedding portrait taken by a guy on the street corner. (No, it was totally legit!) He took a couple of lovely shots. As we were waiting for the photos to appear magically from the printer in his carry-all bag, we perused his portfolio which consisted of tag board with shots of other happy couples. In an amazing high-five from the universe, someone in our group noticed his name posted: Braulio Cuenca — the name of the city Kathy and Sara are moving to in Ecuador!

Kathy and Braulio Cuenca, photographer. He was able to get a shot of me with my eyes open! 

 

We spent the rest of the day eating and laughing. It was fabulous from beginning to end and it felt like I’ve known these blogging buddies forever. Call me an old softy, but this is one of the reasons I started blogging. (The other reasons: A. instant fame and B. fabulous wealth haven’t seemed to materialize yet.)

Kathy and Sara, who’ve been together for seven years, both remarked that they never thought this would be possible. I’m so glad it was and that I was there to witness it.

Have you had the opportunity to meet any bloggers in person? 

P.S. In a pay-it-forward way, Kathy and Sara had attended Tori’s Very Bloggy Wedding last year. (Tori, next time I’m in Nashville, put the coffee on, I’m coming over.)

 

 

2. Thank you, Nancy! As if the above didn’t prove that there are more people out there besides my mother who read my posts, blog reader Nancy sent a micro-loan to an organization I support regularly: Kiva.org. She used the “friend” link, so Kiva generously kicked in a $25 bonus credit allowing me to make another loan for free.

For those of you not familiar, Kiva is a non-profit that connects lenders and borrowers around the world to help alleviate poverty. Through their site, you can find someone in need of a micro-loan and send a donation to fund their dreams or help them get a fresh start. For a limited time,  if you’re considering trying out Kiva and you use this link, we’ll each get $25 in our baskets to make a loan for free. Or you can visit the bonus page for more info.

I used my $25 bonus credit from Nancy’s micro-loan to help Tho from Cambodia. Tho is 38 years old, married with three children. She lives in in Kampong Speu Province, Cambodia, located in the southeastern part of the country. She applied for a $1,000 to build a new house. Tho and her husband are farmers, earning approximately $3 each day. Her loan is now fully funded by lenders from South Bend to Singapore to Sweden.

Thanks again, Nancy! I hope you enjoy your experience with Kiva as much as I do.

 

 

3 . What is it? Each week Lenore posts a “what is it” photo, encouraging readers to submit their guesses. So I thought of her when I saw this item out by the curb on garbage pick-up day. It was made of wood and the “fingers” moved as bit as levers. Of course, Lenore knows the items in her photos, but here I have absolutely no idea. So I’m asking you…what is it?

What is it?

 

4. Quack. Gretchen Rubin over at The Happiness Project  had an interesting post about “decoy habits.”

A decoy habit is a habit that a person claims to want to adopt—but really doesn’t intend to do. Often, decoy habits reflect other people’s values or priorities. Decoy habits are harmful, I think, because they allow us to pretend to have certain aims or values that we don’t really have. Maybe we don’t want to admit what we really want to do, or maybe two values are in conflict.

I recognized myself (and a few people I know) immediately. See below for example. There are plenty of times I’ve said, “I want to give up coffee.” I mean, let’s face it, I don’t really want to give up coffee. I probably should—or at the very least cut the i.v. line that runs from the coffee pot to my arm—but I have no intention of doing so. I’d not thought of it as a form of avoidance. I used to think of it as idealism, as in “Ideally I’d like to give up coffee,” but now I see that without setting a real plan, it was always somewhere in the future, a hope to be a better person. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to refill my coffee cup.

Do you have any decoy habits?

 

 

5. Serenity Now.  Last year I participated in a meditation challenge. For three weeks, I meditated for 15 minutes each day. While I didn’t realize the major health benefits some studies show — everything from improved blood circulation to  decrease in dependence on anxiety medication — I felt generally calmer and slower to anger when someone, let’s say, wouldn’t step away from the doors on the subway. My hope was that the three weeks would be long enough to develop a good routine to continue meditating on my own without the daily reminders and prompts.

Thaaaat didn’t work out exactly as planned. I don’t know if the habit wasn’t ingrained enough in my day. Maybe some event came along to disrupt the pattern and I never returned to meditating except in fits and starts. I’ve been wanting to dedicate myself to it ever since (see above mention of “decoy habit”) and I found an app for that. The appropriately-named calm.com is a site or app that allows you to pick a mediation time of two, 10, or 20 minutes with a variety of beautiful scenes / nature sounds to choose from. I’m partial to the ocean and wave sound myself. (Note to New Yorkers reading this: they do not offer subway sounds to lull you into tranquility.) I’m setting an intention to meditate for two minutes a day so this doesn’t become another decoy habit.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Friday Five

1. Daring Greatly. In a previous post, I shared Brene Brown’s fantastic TED talk:  The power of vulnerability. Talk about eye-opener! (If you haven’t seen the TED talk, check it out below. It’s time well-spent!) What has me singing Dr. Brown’s praises again is that I just finished her book, Daring Greatly. She has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, shame, courage and worthiness, and in this book she shares all that she learned. It’s a powerful, life-changing book. I have highlights and sticky notes on nearly every page. Here are a few points that resonated the most:

1. Belonging and “fitting in” are not the same thing. Brene found that fitting in means molding yourself to what another person or group of people wants you to be. In other words, trying to be like them in order to be accepted by them. Belonging is quite different. Belonging is showing up and being seen for who you really are and being accepted for that. “Belonging starts with self-acceptance,” she says. “Your level of belonging can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough gives you the courage to be authentic.

2. Guilt is not a 4-letter word. Well, that’s true, but you know what I mean. Guilt is about behavior — something we did or something we failed to do. It’s this discomfort that often is the precursor to real change. But this is different from shame. Shame is when we feel bad about who we are. Two different ends of the spectrum.

3. Perfectionism is a 4-letter word. “Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfectly, look perfectly and act perfectly, we can avoid the pain of judgment,” says Brene. It’s like trying to build an impenetrable wall around your life. Perfectionism focuses on others by worrying about what they will think, rather than promoting true achievement and growth.

4. Vulnerability is courage. This is Brene’s overarching message throughout the book. There are a couple of myths about vulnerability that most of us buy into: first, that it is weakness and second, that it is optional. “Vulnerability is the most accurate measure of our individual courage…and the only choice you have is how you handle the feelings of being exposed.” We all do something with those feelings. Some of us numb them (food, alcohol, shopping). Some of us try to be perfect (see above). Some of us disconnect. She wants us to recognize these feelings and challenge ourselves to show up and allow ourselves to be vulnerable because that is how we dare greatly.

Do any of these points resonate with you? How did you try to dare greatly?

2. Everyday joy.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

How do you find the miraculous in the common?

3. Mini Book Review: The Burgess Boys, by Elizabeth Strout.

From the jacket flap: Though the Burgess boys grew up in small-town Maine, they eventually move to New York City. (My note: the characters live in my neighborhood in Brooklyn!) Their worlds are upended when their sister, Susan, urgently calls them to come home because her son, Zach, has committed what is being deemed a hate crime.

At times, I loved this book. I was completely engaged with the characters and felt like I knew them personally, even the minor characters. I could open the book randomly to any page and know who was speaking. That takes a lot of skill and a keen eye. Strout makes it look easy, but I’m here to tell you, it’s one of the hardest things to pull off.   Then there were other times I had to encourage myself to go back to the book. (“Don’t give up now, you’re only 100 pages from the end.”) The consequences of the major plot point are subtle, kind of like life. We often only see in hindsight the thread unraveling from the choices we make. While this is true, as a reader, I wanted something big to happen. I wanted suspense to pull me in and force me to keep turning the pages, wondering what would happen to the characters. I wanted…something more. I loved Strout’s last book, Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize. That book is a subtle telling of intertwined short stories, also with very complex characters who live fairly ordinary lives. The Burgess Boys is in the same vein so I was expecting to fall head-over-heels for it, and I felt a bit sad that I wasn’t swept away. I think I preferred this sort of subtle storytelling in the bite-size pieces of short story format (a la Olive Kitteridge) rather than a novel length work.

If you love digging into family sagas, I have a feeling you’d really enjoy this one. If you like a lot of action and plot twists, this probably isn’t the story for you.  It seems like I’m not the only one who had mixed feelings.

4. Spring has sprung!

5. Two poems. Wrapping up the guest poet series as we near the end of Poetry Month, I’d like to turn this space over to poet Amy Holman. She’s going to share one poem she’s written and one poem she admires.

Guest Poet: Amy Holman

I have been invited to share my sensibility with you via poetry. The first part of the assignment is to give you a poem of mine and explain what the hell I was thinking. In doing this I can’t help but think how I am also sharing with you the particular magazine that published it, and thus inviting you to read further. Who shall I choose? But, that’s the literary consultant in me, talking to you about editorial sensibilities at magazines. It could be good to sell my book through a well-chosen poem. I do have a collection published that is not out of print, and a chapbook that is out of print, and other chapbooks that had mysterious print runs, and a publisher who skipped town. I think newer is better. It implies that I’m still writing.

“Freelance Destiny” is my selection at Zocalo Public Square, a Los Angeles-based online magazine for journalism with a poetry section edited by Stephanie Brown. This poem references a TV character of a show that aired in the 1960′s, and which got a revival with the advent of DVD boxed sets, and later a remake. My brother gave me the boxed set. We had watched another show, “Thunderbirds”, by the same writers when were tiny. In this poem, I take the female fighter pilot, Destiny Angel, from the program “Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons”, and imagine what she did with her time in retirement. Since she was a stylish woman who sewed her own clothes and a fierce fighter pilot, I figured she would go freelance and help Human Rights Watch in ousting the Uzbekistan dictator’s daughter and clothing designer, Gulnara Karimova, from Fashion Week. I was delighted to see in the list of designers featured at that event one named Michael Angel. Perhaps it was destiny. I used the triolet 8-line form in stanzas.

The second part of the assignment is for me to share a favorite poem with you. I have lots of poems that I love. One of my favorites of a newer poet, Alexandra Teague, comes out of her first book, Mortal Geography, published by Persea. Teague plays with grammar in a poem about teaching English as a second language. It reminds me of some rules of order I had forgotten. The poem is also about the power of language to articulate the ineffable, which poems do even better than prose. It surprises. “Adjectives of Order” was also published in Slate. [Note: there is a also an audio of Alexandra reading the poem.]

Amy Holman is the author of the poetry collections, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and Wait For Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 1995). She has work in two subway anthologies, Token Entry (a poem) and The Subway Chronicles (an essay), and poetry, fiction, and essays in numerous print and online journals. She is a literary consultant and teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. 

Coming next week: Kathy McCullough from Reinventing the Event Horizon and her partner Sara get married, and I had the distinct honor and privilege of being a witness at the ceremony.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Friday Five

1. You Are Beautiful! A simple statement, but a powerful message. Sometimes we all just need a little reminder of something we already know. Ten years ago, Matthew Hoffman wanted to spread the word, so he had 100 stickers printed and put them around town. He offered to send stickers to anyone who requested them. Now more than a half million have been distributed around the globe. The project has even inspired murals and exhibitions at institutions.

He developed a Kickstarter campaign to document the past decade in a book. The funding goal was surpassed last month. Look for the book this September. In the meantime go to the site to get some free stickers of your own to help spread the message.

You Are Beautiful New Orleans, LA

You Are Beautiful at the Brooklyn Bridge

You Are Beautiful San Jose Airport

2. Bacon and Egg Man.  So, I was at a book launch party this week at the Tribeca Grand. I say this casually as if book launch parties at the Tribeca Grand are something I do every week. If it sounds far too swanky for the likes of me, it was. I took plenty of photos to give you a taste of it, but sadly, the only one not blurry and dark was this one of the exterior. (It only gets ritzier on the inside.)

But on to the reason I was there: A book party to celebrate my friend Ken Wheaton’s second novel, Bacon and Egg Man.  I’ve read earlier incarnations when it was just a little ol’ WIP, so I’m looking forward to seeing if he took all of my editing suggestions checking out the final results. Writers spend a lot of time in a strange solitary confinement so it was great to celebrate and acknowledge his achievement.

I hope you’ll get an opportunity to pick up a copy. Here’s a down-and-dirty synopsis and then you can read an excerpt here:

In the halls of Congress, on the streets, in the media, the war on fast food is on. Tofu may be topical, but bacon is eternal. Bacon and Egg Man, Ken Wheaton’s second novel, is a sly send of up of a politically correct food establishment, where the Northeast has split off from the rest of the United States. The new Federation is ruled by the electoral descendants of King Mike, a man who made it his mission to form a country based on good, clean living. But you can’t keep good food down. And Wes Montgomery, a journalist at the last print paper in the Federation, is a mild-mannered bacon-and-egg dealer on the side. Until he gets pinched and finds himself thrust into Chief Detective Blunt’s wild-eyed plot to bring down the biggest illegal food supplier in the land. To make matters worse, Wes is partnered with Detective Hillary Halstead, the cop who, while undercover, became his girlfriend. Their journey takes them from submarine lairs to sushi speakeasies, from Montauk to Manhattan, where they have to negotiate with media magnate The Gawker before a climatic rendezvous with the secretive man who supplies the Northeast with its high cholesterol contraband, the most eternal of all breakfast foods: bacon and eggs.
Are you reading a book right now that you’d recommend? Share in the comments. I’m always looking for new books to put on my TBR list. I’m reading Elizabeth Strout’s new novel The Burgess Boys. (I won a copy on Goodreads!) Loving it, so far!
3. Airports. When I was in high school, my wonderful literature teacher told my class that she found inspiration at the airport. She said she could spend hours dreaming where people were going and why they might be going there. She’d filled dozens of notebooks with character sketches and letting her creativity run wild. Until then, I’d never really kept a notebook. I’d tried keeping diaries, but after a few entries I’d lose interest. To be introduced to a character / image notebook was really intriguing. Even today I carry a notebook just about everywhere I go.

I hadn’t thought about that in years until I read a post from Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. She posed a question to her readers: What is your favorite thing to do in an airport?  The answers were fun, ranging from browsing in the bookstore (a personal favorite) to shopping for perfume at the duty free shop to downing a rum and coke.

So tell me, what is your favorite thing to do in an airport?

P.S. This is another great opportunity to tell your about an upcoming contest I’m hosting in April about my vacation destination. More details to come!

4. What is a weekend? Fans of Downton Abbey will no doubt recognize the dowager countess’s (a.k.a. Maggie Smith’s) now-famous question. Her confusion is understandable for a woman who has lived an aristocratic life, never having to work. I have come to feel the same way, but for exactly the opposite reason. I used to look forward to the weekend with gleeful abandon. A brief respite from the office. The luxury to follow my own schedule. The enjoyment of small adventures. Lately my weekends have become filled with errands and obligations. One task after another in a never-ending sea of chores. Every Sunday night, I’m wondering where the time went. Does anyone else feel the same way? Do you have any suggestions on how to put the f-u-n back into the weekend?

5. Price that mansion. Part of my neighborhood is an historic district with stately, gorgeous homes around every corner. Here in a new, occasional series on the blog, I’ll share photos and a bit of history of some of these mansions. This place is on the market. Want to put in a bid? Guess how much you’ll need.

This 50-foot-wide neo-classical limestone mansion was constructed in 1912 by the Tracy family, who were in shipping and used it as a family home.

The floor plan is largely unchanged from when the Tracy family owned it. There have only been three owners. This Italian marble fireplace is 8-feet tall.

The mansion has 23 rooms, nine bathrooms and approximately 10,000 square feet of space. These wood panels are made from mahogany.

The curved marble entry hall has bronze doors and Corinthian-style columns.

Have a great weekend everyone! 

The Valentine’s Day Five

I will preface this post by stating that I’m not a Valentine’s Day person. I typically don’t go in for all the schmaltzy, gooey trappings of this force-fed holiday.

So why am I posting this Valentine’s Day? Perhaps subconsciously all of the items I’d pulled together for my usual Friday Five post were of the same vein. Each is wonderful on its own, but today it seemed appropriate to post them all together.

1. Nothing good gets away. Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968) might be best-known as the author of East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, but he was also a prolific letter-writer. Among his correspondence is this beautiful response to his teenage son Thom’s letter, in which the boy confesses to have fallen desperately in love with a girl named Susan while at boarding school. Steinbeck could have brushed off his son’s feelings, but instead replied with tenderness, optimism and timelessness.

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa

Via Letters of Note, a wonderful site collecting correspondence of note from well known people with a book coming out in May 2013. Makes one wonder what will happen in the future. “Tweets of Note” just doesn’t sound nearly as interesting.



2. Paper Airplanes. The most heartwarming short film you’re likely to see today.

Many thanks to Lorna for sharing this lovely video.



3. How do people fall in love, part 1. Author Gemma Elwin Harris asked thousands of grade school children between the ages of four and twelve to send in their most restless questions (Why can’t I tickle myself? Are we all related? Who named all the cities? What makes me me? Is it okay to eat a worm? Who invented chocolate? If the universe started from nothing, how did it become something? Why are some people mean?), then invited some of today’s most prominent scientists, philosophers, and writers to answer them. The result is Big Questions from Little People & Simple Answers from Great Minds, a compendium of fascinating explanations from experts in their fields such as Mary Roach, Philip Pullman, Bear Grylls, Philippa Gregory, Noam Chomsky and Mario Batali with part of the proceeds being donated to Save the Children.

I thought one of the most intriguing answers was to the all-engulfing question: How do we fall in love? Author Jeanette Winterson offers this response:

You don’t fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It’s like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else’s planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signaled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else’s orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)

And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don’t want to be without. That’s it.

P.S. You have to be brave.

4. How do people fall in love, part 2. Ever since humans could tell stories, we’ve been trying to describe how it feels to be in love…from Shakespeare (“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”) to  J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield (“I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.”) to Longfellow (“It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.”)

Jeanette Winterson’s lovely explanation aside, perhaps my favorite explanation of how we fall in love is from author John Green’s book The Fault in Our Stars. The main character tells us: “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

How would you define love?

5. Heart Attack. A silly and fun dance of hearts.

Bonus 6. I couldn’t resist adding this video because there is nothing that makes me happier than to see joyful dogs loving the moment. Here, they are enjoying the sun and sand at a dog beach in Chicago.

Now that I’m appropriately in the spirit, I’m ready to spread the love. For the next two days—February 14–15, 2013—my book, The Subway Chronicles: More Scenes from Life in New York, is free on Kindle. If you love the book, then please leave a loving review on Amazon. (That’s a lot of love!)

Don’t own a Kindle? No problem! Kindle books can also be read using the Free Kindle Reader App for your Web Browser, PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry or Android. The Kindle version is free for only two days. Tell a friend. Spread the love!

How will you be celebrating Valentine’s Day? Have a great weekend everyone!

Friday Five

1. Reggie and Me. 

2. A Room of One’s Own.  One of the daily prompts this week just made my heart go pitter patter: A genie has granted your wish to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?

My apartment is so small that the idea of having a special space reserved for reading and writing is a fantasy on par with George Clooney feeding me peeled grapes at his Italian villa on Lake Como………………………………

Where was I?

Oh, yes. A writing space.

When I write I’m either on the computer at my dining room table. Sometimes, for a change of scenery, I walk three paces to my couch and write there. My perfect writing space would consist of a desk and a nice view. That’s it really. It doesn’t have to be a fancy desk like this:

Or this:

It could be a desk like this:

Ernest Hemingway’s desk in Key West

Or this:

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Desk via The Guardian

Do you have a special place to read and write? What would be in your dream space?

3. Do you sell stuff? According to Daniel Pink’s new book, To Sell Is Human: the Surprising Truth about Moving Others, we’re all in sales, no matter what career path we’ve chosen. Whether you’re a graphic designer, a stay-at-home mom or a waiter, we’re all trying to persuade others to see our side of things or to get them to do something on our behalf.

I realize how true this is for writers, and how hard it is to make pitches. (Me! Me!) That’s why I’m a writer and not in sales, I often whine. But the fact is that I need to get more comfortable tooting my own horn, as it were, so I’ve read a lot of web advice about formulating a good pitch whether to a literary agent or a boardroom, but Daniel Pink’s strategies feel easier to follow because they don’t feel like “selling.”

Here are his six strategies for making a great pitch:

*The one-word pitch. Distill your ideas down to just one short word. Think: “Priceless” or “Search.” My one-word pitch to myself this year is “balance.”

*The question pitch. By asking a question, you invite others to come up with their own reasons for agreeing. (Note: this strategy only works if underlying arguments are strong.) For example: “Can you make a salad with 5 veggies tonight?” (As seen on a bus stop advertisement)

*The rhyming pitch. People embrace ideas more easily when they’re expressed in rhyme. “Thanks for pitching in to the right bin!” (A recycling sign in an airport)

*The subject-line pitch. We all want to have our emails read! Utility, curiosity, and specificity are keys to making subject lines more effective. “3 simple but proven ways to get your e-mail opened” or “Some weird things I just learned about e-mail.”

*Twitter pitch. Say it in 140 characters or less.

*The Pixar pitch. This is the one that taps in to my writerly sensibilities. Express your idea in the Pixar story sequence: “Once upon a time _____. Every day, _____. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.”

Are you comfortable making pitches? Have you used any of these strategies?

4. Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Bishop. I was only introduced to Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry recently by way of a friend who loves her work. Noted for “precise descriptions of the physical world and an air of poetic serenity,” she most often wrote about the struggle to find a sense of belonging. Her popularity seems to be on the rise, 30 years after her death. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet was born today in 1911 in Worcester, Mass.

Here is an excerpt of her popular poem, “At the Fishhouses.” I love this poem because it is so strongly rooted in the location, in this case Nova Scotia where she spent a good deal of her youth.  My goodness, you can almost smell the fish.

At the Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting,

his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

a dark purple-brown,

and his shuttle worn and polished.

The air smells so strong of codfish

it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses,

set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

is an ancient wooden capstan,

cracked, with two long bleached handles

and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

where the ironwork has rusted.

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

He was a friend of my grandfather.

We talk of the decline in the population

and of codfish and herring

while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

the blade of which is almost worn away.

Read the full text here and listen to an audio clip of Ms. Bishop reading the poem.

Have you read any of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems? Which one is your favorite? 

5. Carpe Diem. Reggie and I were on his early morning walk and came across this note left after a brief snowfall. Sounds like good advice.

How will you carpe the diem?

Have a great weekend, everyone!