Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
Cindy on June 3rd, 2011
By isolating himself at Walden Pond, Thoreau hadn’t run away from life. He’d run toward it. Why couldn’t we leave our lives of quiet, digital desperation and do the same?” — Susan Maushart, from The Winter of Our Disconnect
Once in a while, we all need to unplug. Friends who’ve been visiting this site for a while know I spend less time hanging out here in the “Home Office” once summer arrives. Escaping outdoors — sans laptop — restores my spirit and makes me feel whole again. I’m ready to start this week.
As it happens, I’m reading Susan Maushart’s The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and A Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. It’s a compelling (and often hilarious) memoir detailing how Mausart, a journalist, and her kids made the difficult decision to live without technology for (gulp) six months. Using current research to back her premise, the author shows how limiting our use of technology, including social media, can enrich the quality of our lives and deepen what she calls “real-life” relationships. As soon as I’m finished, I plan to review the book in a column.
But I’m not totally unplugging this summer. Unlike Maushart, I don’t have the willpower to go for more than a week without checking Facebook, blogs, and e-mail. Through August, I’ll continue to post links to my newly published material; or I’ll rerun favorite (previously published) essays in keeping with the season.
Meanwhile, I’m still micro-managing my mother’s life, keeping a watchful eye on her dementia and health-care issues. Trying to find my balance in the midst of it all has been the toughest challenge I’ve faced in a long time. Whenever possible, I follow Thoreau’s sage advice to “Simplify, simplify.” Right now, things with Mom are relatively calm — and I am working to keep them that way.
When you get a chance, please fill me in on what you’re up to this summer … Will you be blogging more or less? Spending more time at the beach or in your garden? Planning a graduation party? Spending less time at the office? Please send me a cyber postcard before you unplug. –CL
– Top photo: My Japanese garden, a favorite backyard escape. Bottom photo: A clematis arching over the gate in our backyard. All photos by Cindy La Ferle. –
Cindy on February 1st, 2011
“Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.” — Saul Bellow
Is it time to stop the flow of memoirs? On Sunday, in “The Problem with Memoirs,” New York Times reviewer Neil Genzlinger made what he called “a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre.”
Then he went on to review four new memoirs to illustrate his points. Genzlinger was pretty brutal. Three of the four memoirs, he said, didn’t need to be written.
Not only did I cringe for the three authors under attack; I took some of what he said personally. For starters, I’ve no doubt that Genzlinger would by bored to tears by my own book — a collection of personal essays celebrating ordinary family moments. And I suspect he’d advise me to discourage the students in my memoir classes to stop seeking publication.
Admittedly, some of Genzlinger’s observations are fair. Bookstore tables and shelves are stacked and stuffed with countless memoirs written by authors who’ve survived cancer, endured domestic violence, raised autistic children, lost spouses or pets, built their own houses, or moved to the country to “simplify” their long-suffering suburban lives. Genzlinger doubts that there’s anything new to add to the genre of personal experience.
If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already in it. Imitation runs rampant in memoir land.” – Neil Genzlinger
Does this really mean that the rest of us leading ordinary lives have no right to write and share our stories?
“If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead, hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life,” Genzlinger advised.
This flies in the face of nearly everything I’ve told my students — and it certainly doesn’t do much to dignify blogging, a favorite second cousin of memoir writing.
In my classes, the majority of new students worry about appearing arrogant when they start writing in the first person. More often than not, my biggest challenge is to assure them that we’ve all learned a thing or two from our experiences; that our stories are worth recording and sharing. So, maybe none of us will make the best-seller list. But I believe we deserve — at the very least — permission to share our history and life lessons with loved ones, if not a wider readership. What do you think? –CL
– “Writer” collage by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on August 12th, 2009
Irrespective of what she reads, though, when she goes back to sit before the computer, there is the same stubborn emptiness, the same locked door.” — Elizabeth Berg, Home Safe
As soon as I hit the “Publish” tab, I started worrying about last week’s blog post. Not that I regretted exposing my family’s elder-care crises. I know many of you can relate to or sympathize with the heartache of witnessing the decline of aging parents. But later in the post, I got a little too gloomy about journalism, blogging, and writing careers.
I didn’t mean to discourage anyone.
This site was originally designed to keep in touch with my newspaper column readers, and over the years it also morphed into a blog for my writing workshop students. I usually don’t give writing “advice” — but I try to offer some insight on the writing life. Most of my students tell me that getting published seems like a mysterious, impossible thing that other people do. So, I make a point of reminding them that that’s not the case at all. Published writers are ordinary people who grow tomatoes, burn casseroles, gripe about politics, miss their kids when they move out, and wish someone else would wash their cars. People like me.
Until recently, though, I’ve rarely said much about the lonely hours of isolation, the frightening abyss of writer’s block, the times I’ve been annoyed at editors and baffled by agents, or the times I’ve wondered if I’m just wasting time. I’ve avoided discussing all that because I believe my role is to encourage, inspire, and excite new writers — to remind you that your dreams of publication are not out of reach. And yet, with so many newspapers and magazines folding lately, and with the book publishing industry in a major crisis, too, I think it’s misleading to suggest that being a writer is loads of fun right now. When the only ones signing fabulous book deals are loons like Sarah Palin (who can’t even deliver a coherent speech), well, to paraphrase Anne Lamott, you too might be inclined to get “down on your hands and knees and drink gin straight from the cat’s dish.”
Regardless, last week I wondered if it was wrong to broadcast how pessimistic I’d been feeling about the future of publishing. And wasn’t it a bit unfair or mean-spirited to announce that “the magic just isn’t there for me” in blogging — especially when I know that many of you take pride in your blogs? So, I almost went back to delete that downer of a paragraph from last week’s post.
But then I finished Elizabeth Berg‘s sweet new novel, Home Safe, and I changed my mind.
In Home Safe, middle-aged novelist Helen Ames is coping with the loss of her husband and her father — and facing a newly emptied nest. Despite all the free time she has, Helen is impossibly blocked, unable to do the writing that has always fulfilled and saved her. I won’t spoil the entire plot for you, in case you’d like to read the novel, but I suspect that Elizabeth Berg herself has endured some of her main character’s career angst. What writer hasn’t?
Like the fictional Helen Ames, I’ve often thought about throwing my drafts in the trash compactor and applying for a “real job” in retail. (I’ve seriously wondered if I’m better suited to a gig at an Eileen Fisher boutique or a cozy independent bookshop with a resident cat.) But along the way, Helen reluctantly tries teaching a writing class, and ultimately learns that she is lifted by coaching others. Just as I’ve been lifted by every hopeful student who’s had the courage to share his or her stories in my classes.
Reading Home Safe, I felt at times as if Berg were holding a mirror to my own conscience. But the real gift in this novel was the permission it gave me to admit aloud that I do get burned-out and discouraged; that no matter how much I’ve achieved, I’m not immune to doubt and insecurity.
Burnout, discouragement, doubt, and insecurity are inexorably chained to the writing life — yet they often precede a second wind or a second act. If you’re in it for the long run, there’s no way you’ll fully appreciate the thrill of seeing your byline under a magazine article or your name on the cover of a book until you’ve battled these demons and gremlins. I wouldn’t be honest, or fair, if I didn’t share that with you too. -- Cindy La Ferle
Cindy on June 8th, 2009
Build a campfire, write your own song, dance your ass off, hike 10 miles — be something that’s not just part of a machine.” — Robert Downes
Visiting Traverse City, Mich., this spring, I picked up the April 20 issue of Northern Express Weekly. I always enjoy the “Random Thoughts” column, penned by Robert Downes, the paper’s publisher and managing editor. So I wasn’t surprised when Downes’ column, “Going Natural — Offline,” hit me where I live and prompted me to reach for the scissors. I clipped the piece and saved it.
In his column, Downes opened with an anecdote about Jack Hicks, a retired Chicago-area librarian who cancelled the Internet because he thought it was “a time-waster” and a mere “imitation of real life.” Downes went on to say that he understood where the librarian is coming from — and wondered if our lives are “being twittered away” when we spend so much time online.
“Those of us who were born long before the digitalization of childhood can recall a time when kids spent as little time as possible indoors. You ran around barefoot outdoors all summer and only came in when your parents yelled themselves hoarse, long after sunset,” Downes recalled. He also pointed out that we shouldn’t be surprised that we now battle the issue of obesity among four-year-olds.
But today’s kids aren’t the only ones losing touch with reality. Too many adults have taken up permanent residence in cyberspace, and I wonder if there’s a correlation between Internet use and the worrisome rise in adult ADD. Though I’ve not been diagnosed with it, I’ve noticed lately that I’m not as focused as I used to be. I jump from project to project — as if I’m merely Web surfing. A lot of my friends complain, too, about feeling vaguely distracted or hollow — and unable to read as many books as they used to.
Out of touch?
Summer is approaching and I’d rather be outdoors as much as possible — and not on my laptop or cell phone. Yet I know that veering off the information superhighway is akin to Thoreau dropping out of society for his Walden sabbatical. Regardless, it’s tempting.
Back in the day before e-mail, blogs, and Facebook, I spent A LOT more time moving around in the real world. (And kids, it really wasn’t that long ago.) I lunched with friends at the outdoor cafes downtown, interviewed people “in person,” finished the books I was reading, took my son to the park and played with him, met with editors at the newspaper office, took long walks with friends or my husband, worked in the garden until dusk. When I did work online, I focused on getting more assignments and polishing my own writing. I didn’t spend time commenting on other writers’ blogs, and didn’t check for new Facebook messages every 15 minutes.
Today I’m nearly compulsive about my time on the computer. I’ve barely poured my first cup of coffee before I’m in my office checking my e-mail. And I never travel without a laptop on vacation. Thanks to all the hours I spend online, I finish reading fewer books, newspapers, and magazines — and have let many of my subscriptions lapse. And whether I’m in town or out, it seems, my friends and I send e-mail or send Facebook messages more often than we chat on the phone or visit in person. This can’t be such a good thing.
Recently, a couple of my neighbors and I decided to establish a weekly dinner date at a local restaurant — within walking distance — for some real community contact. This is long overdue. While I’d never cancel the Internet or disconnect from the online friendships I value, I need to devote more attention offline to the people and things that mean the most to me.
As Downes suggests, “It might be good for the soul to take an annual vacation from your iPod, Internet, cell phone, Twitter, MySpace, and all the other electronic strings attached to your life for a week or so, if only to reboot your sense of humanity and become a ‘real person’ once a year.” My only question: Why just once a year? –CL
– Garden photo copyright by Cindy La Ferle –
Cindy on December 6th, 2008
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver
So, I asked a newly retired newspaper columnist if she’s planning to start a blog — especially now that her work isn’t appearing regularly in print. I’ve admired her beautiful writing for a long time, I told her, and would happily read anything she cares to post.
“Does the world really need another blog?” she shot back, adding that it’s hard enough to keep up with her e-mail — not to mention Facebook, Twitter, Gather, LinkedIn, and all the other “distractions” online. “Who in the world has time for all of that?” she said. “Now that I’m retired, I want my real life back.”
My columnist friend got me thinking about how much time I’ve been spending online in recent years. After putting in two or three hours (daily) on writing projects or assignments, my routine goes something like this:
- Answer e-mail
- Work on posts for various Web sites (including 50-something Moms)
- Update status on Facebook
- Visit friends’ blogs and leave comments
- Surf the Web for juicy political articles
Before I know it, morning has morphed into afternoon, and I’ve only left my desk to refill my coffee mug. Hanging out in cyberspace was perfectly fine — even ideal — when my son was much younger and needed a stay-at-home mom. But the kid is 23 now, and lives five hours from home. Besides, even when he was in middle school, the Internet didn’t monopolize my time.
So what did I do with my “one wild and precious life” before a keyboard became part of my anatomy?
I accomplished so much more. For starters, I generated a lot more article proposals for print publications. I read more books. Met friends regularly for lunch or dinner. Started and completed more art projects. Rode my mountain bike, took longer walks, or worked in the garden. Explored local businesses and flea markets. Pored through cookbooks and tested new recipes on my appreciative family.
Like my retired friend, I want that life back again.
Trying an experiment this week, I limited my “social time” on the computer to 45 minutes per day. (That includes checking e-mail, surfing, and visiting blogs.) At first it felt weird, since I’ve been compulsive about checking my e-mail several times a day. But soon I felt happier, more creative — and liberated from the tyranny of my computer. I felt as if I’d finally seized control of my free time.
During that free time this week, I made a few simple Christmas gifts for friends, then completed an altered art project to enter in upcoming exhibition. After cleaning my art studio, I picked out a pretty note card and wrote a heartfelt message to a college room mate. (Imagine her surprise when she gets snail mail from me!) Later in the week, I cut evergreen branches to decorate the empty planters on the porch. I called my mother more often, just to talk. I even had time to plan a small party for dear friends whose December birthdays typically get lost in the holiday shuffle.
Once again, I began to appreciate the sacred in the ordinary.
My late father used to talk a lot about the importance of life balance. “Everything in moderation” was one of his favorite catchphrases, and he used it whenever the topic of substance abuse or addiction came into the conversation. This fall, I realized that my computer use was bordering on obsession or addiction. And like any addiction, it was impacting my attitude and relationships with the most important people in my life. I knew I needed to come up for air.
I truly enjoy posting blogs and following colleagues on Facebook. I love surfing the Net and making new discoveries, new friends. And I love reading the blogs of other writers. I can’t “quit” entirely — but from now on, I’ll try to spend less time hugging my computer. – Cindy La Ferle
Please note:Â I’ll still continue to post essays, short blogs, or announcements at least twice a week.
Once in a while, we all need to unplug. Friends who’ve been visiting this site for a while know I spend less time hanging out here in the “Home Office” once summer arrives. Escaping outdoors — sans laptop — restores my spirit and makes me feel whole again. I’m ready to start this week.
When you get a chance, please fill me in on what you’re up to this summer … Will you be blogging more or less? Spending more time at the beach or in your garden? Planning a graduation party? Spending less time at the office? Please send me a cyber postcard before you unplug. –CL 
