The following two graphics are my seminal finds for the week. I hate using that word, seminal, but sometimes it is the correct one to use. Unfortunately the word oval has another meaning or I would be promoting that as a better word to describe items or ideas that are seeds for novel conceptualizations.
The first one, the conversation prism, may look like a color wheel at first glance, but it is much more layered and contextually rich with information about relationships between elements of common digital communication tools. Look at it, download it, study it. Most infographics do not actually add value or information to the subjects they depict. This one does. The linked site is well worth bookmarking and then checking out for updates every once in a while.
Malcolm Gladwell irritates some with the cultural condensations from which he spins off his books, but I adore ideas, patterns, and playing with explanations for correlations between the two. Thought is good. Observation is good. Reasonable conjecture is exercise for the mind. So I like Gladwell. His Tipping Point was best, in my opinion, but Outliers points out some generalizations worthy of note as well.
To become an expert takes lots of work. Success is more fickle.
R is for Retrieving Memories with Objects.
Sometime it can be fun to mix up your elicitation tools or prompts and try something fun. It is in that spirit that I am focusing on the types of rug I remember, who they belonged to, and what I remember about them.
This of course this could be any type of item that you remember encountering in almost all the significant houses and apartments you’ve entered at different times in your life. Lamps? Paintings? Bedding? Hats? The focus can be any common item that you tend to notice, and memorable ones you have encountered.
What do you think this says about you? Maybe there is an aesthetic you are drawn to. Maybe it is the engineering and the appreciation you have for the structure of the items. Are they nice things? Scary or unusual things? Out of all the ones you have encountered in life, which one or type is your favorite, which one disturbed you the most?
My Responses. Cue: Rugs
Woven Rag Rugs
These are my all time favorites. These are what my mother and grandmother used. Made from “scrap” or discarded cloth, the material is cut into strips, about an inch in diameter. The ends were folded over and sewn together, and the resultant long strip is wrapped into a ball, like a ball of twine. That is as far as I have seen the process done. At this point we would take the balls of fabric to a community group, church group, or individual with a loom to be woven.
There is something very comforting about having the sturdy blue denim of old blue jeans woven into a long entranceway rug that welcomes each footstep entering your home. The orange and brown work socks of my father were made into small rugs that were placed by bedsides to protect toes stepping from warm bed to cold floors.
Room Size Rugs vs. Wall-to-wall Carpeting
In the old farm houses my close and extended family lived in, the 8 x 12 or 10 by 12 area, machine-woven rug was the standard floor covering. These did not stand out as unusual to me. They were probably our family standard the had not quite given way from the early 1900s to the wall-to-wall carpet that became the norm in mid-20th century homes.
Canvas
Painted canvas always signaled avant guard, artistic vibes. It wasn’t common. In the more eclectic regions of my youthful travels I saw these in lofts and apartments. They have now become more common as permanent dyes and washable canvas are used for inexpensive floor coverings.
Hand Woven or Loomed or Hooked
The creme de la creme of carpet. I only saw these in museums and wealthy people’s homes until well into adulthood when I moved to the western U.S. and diversely populated urban areas where carpets from the middle east and Indian subcontinent were status items that many purchased and collected. Few people had artist signed persian carpets, but seeing one still makes my eyes pop with wonder as to the thousands of hours it took to make it and the known artistry of having a specific master weaver’s work shop.
And there is the beautiful craftsmanship found in American ceremonial and utility rugs and horse blankets made by tribal groups in the central plains and western U.S.
Hooked Rugs
Hooked rugs tend to have intricate designs, be smaller in dimensions, and be soft to the touch. I always think craftswoman, or man, when encounter these.
Crocheted Rugs
My mother crocheted rugs. The initial methodology was the same as as creating balls of fabric for woven rugs, but rather than being made on a loom, she would finish the rugs by crocheting an oval rug.
Material, Method, and Memory
Like most things you write about in memoir, your stories start with an idea: Aunt Ethel’s hysterically funny stories about her brothers and sister’s escapades decades ago. But what gets you to that idea? Stories from Aunt Ethel might be visually linked to the memory of sitting on the floor of your Grandmother’s living room. Tracing the design of a reddish-maroon leaf patterned rug, I can still see the sensible and sturdy, lace-up leather heels she wore, and the slightly baggy nylons that jiggled as she tapped her foot on the slightly worn carpet showing threads here and there.
It is only a few second memory of the carpet on Grandma’s floor but it connects you to mid-century design, clothing changes (baggy nylons?) and whether your aunt had thin or thick ankles. These are all things you can add to scenes and stories in your memoir that you wouldn’t have remembered without taking a few moments to thing about childhood memories of rugs. These bits are just things you can think about to bring back memories that surround the item. That carpet and shoe take you back to your life in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s that help you write from reality.
I guess I didn’t look people in the eye much, I looked at floors, and shoes. But these items told me a bunch about the finances, health, and style of my relatives; things no one ever told me but I could deduce from threadbare carpets, swollen ankles, and the jazzy design on a carpet.
Give the technique a try. Flatware or silverware. Window coverings. You might be surprised what memories these trigger.
J is Juxtaposed
Adjacency in Thought
A very handy technique for relating events, people, or things in an unexpected or jarring way is to juxtapose unexpected aspects of a story. You can do the same thing to show change. I grew up watching Mutual Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Animals seemed so vital and Marlin and Jim did not tell us how many large animals were endangered and likely to become extinct before the century ended. We are now in the middle of the rapidly expanding accelerating 6th extinction. Bits of info are temporally removed from each other but juxtaposed as both are depictions of the world that stand next to each other in many Boomers’ minds.
I often think about growing up in a sea of corn fields before connection with the outside world was instantaneous and certainly not indexed by small town libraries. There was nary any likely means of escape for a 12 year old who wanted nothing more than to teleport to Woodstock in 1969.
Most of my teenage years found me wishing I could find David Bowie albums in the five and dime of my tiny town, or transform into Patti Smith. Instead I was developing what I would discover was a deep seated need to be like a few others displaced in time and space from where they were meant to be. When I first heard Chrissy Hyne and the Pretenders sing about Akron, Ohio I knew I was not alone. She and I were standing side by side in different times and places as 14 year olds that knew that the adjacency of girl and city was a juxtaposition that made everyone uncomfortable.
There are always things that seem out of kilter, but sometimes they aren’t so much blurry as juxtaposed in an unexpected way. Calling out difference through side by side comparison does not have to be through a physical placement.
We might ask ourselves why we always think of certain people or places at the same time. I have developed a deeper understanding my feelings about events and people by how my mind connects them even though they never touched in time or space. Somehow the neurons in my brain that trigger thoughts of a friend gone many years and an apartment I once had though my friend entered or even knew of it. In the writing of memoir we can juxtapose people, places, or things through time.
I cannot think of Jacque Cousteau without thinking about the plastic island of trash in the center of the Pacific. I juxtapose them in my mind just as I do the extinction of the Northern White Rhino this past year and the massive herds of wildebeest running across the African Veldt. Unconnected yet somehow inextricably linked.
Physical Juxtaposition
Visual
Want to write about a when you were a kid? A great way to jog your memory is to use a bulletin board or white board to post pictures of or write out thoughts about childhood friends, the house where you lived, books you read, and the like. Visual cues and triggers are helpful, but there are other physical cues you can use as well.
Scents
I think most of us know that scents can evoke very strong memories. Take advantage of this wonderful almost frightening method of recalling memory.
- Did your high school nemesis chew juicy fruit gum? Purchase a pack a chew a stick or smell one when you are writing about how being in the hall during class change was stressful due to bullying.
- Cook something your mother or grandmother may have made that will fill your house with a happy scent from childhood. A scented candle can have the same effect.
- Want to recall memories about your first gear-head boyfriend? Walk by a mechanic’s garage, or into a tire shop to aid memory.
- Perfume can be very evocative and linked to time and place. Get some patchouli, lemon, or baby-powder to use as an elicitation tool of certain time periods in your life.
Auditory
Music, chimes, and bells can send out mind back in time almost instantly. The song Humming Bird by Seals and Crofts instantly transports me back to summer of 1972 when I met my best high school friend and we listened to this song constantly. It now reminds me of how few years we would have together before she flew away. Chimes, bells, and buzzers remind me of class endings, friends’ bicycles zooming by, and Family Feud.
Senses are so powerful. Memoir writers do not have to rely on unprompted memory. Use the tools that work for you.
April Around the Corner
April brings the A to Z Writing / Blogging Challenge.
This year,in Apri, I will be posting 26 posts, one for each letter of the alphabet. The topic “Permission to Write” will be the theme to guide me through the 26 posts.
This grouping of posts will, I hope, give you permission to write about anything, and all things. These will be enabling permissions rather than constraining prompts. Sometimes, as 21st Century woman, I find so many other tasks, to dos, and ought to dos, that I do not prioritize my writing with great importance. I suspect I am not the only person to put my needs, especially when it comes to writing, far lower on my to do list than it deserves. Far lower than I deserve.
Women need access to other women’s thoughts, writings, knowledge, and wisdom. If we do not write these down, record them, and at least attempt to preserve them in some fashion, then we are ill-serving our daughters, nieces, and all future women to repeat mistakes we made and from which they will not be able learn.
I am sharing what I believe are carefully crafted elicitation tools. Prompts , in their simplest form, can poke you and produce an answer to a question. An elicitation tool, named and used by social scientists, walks with you down a path into a private memory garden filled with reference to images, emotions, and even scents that are connected to experiences from your life.
This is the difference between, “When was your grandmother born?” and “Tell me about the first memories you have of your grandmother’s kitchen, porch, or garden.”
We have to ask the right type of question if we want to tell a nuanced story.
The Central web page for the challenge can be found here. However, this site is older, insecure, http web protocol and and not the secure https protocol that all online readers should look for when opening or reading a site.
The listing of the participating sites can be found here in this google doc.
To participate in the A to Z Challenge, you will need to register here. Why? So you can read and draw inspiration from other participants’ writings.
Enjoy, think, write!
An Opening for Creativity
This weekend was a mish-mash of feelings and reactions.
A war started. Horrific atrocities against civilians. Mind-numbing and soul crushing but I had to put that behind me so I could focus on a legal matter that had been weighing on me since my mother’s death in 2007.
I signed off on the acceptance of a purchase offer for the remaining part of my parent’s farm that was still in the family. The buyers have a while to get the funding finalized, but it should all be a done deal in about a month. I am so relieved. The past two years have been distracting and stressful as I had to file a complaint partition against distant relations by marriage and some closely related family as there was no agreement on selling the property or buying me out. It is not fun to burn bridges connecting family.
As soon as I filed my copy of the signed contract an image of my mother and father flashed through my mind and the tears began flowing. The tears were not tears of sadness. Just tears of relief, finally there was closure. Closure for me of the legal hassles, but also the closure of wrapping up the ties to my parents’ land. In a way it was the last good-bye to them.
I think I am getting a Medicare problem resolved too. That also happened at the end of last week.
Deep breaths and big sighs.
I know that something has changed in my psyche as today I spent a fair amount of time thinking of legacy craft projects I will do after not having moved to start them for the last many years.
There will be much more about these in the near future. I have most of the tools I need, and there are hand-me-downs that I would like make another life for as art. Creativity returns.
The Plan for My Website
Note about the style of this post: I have done this type of winding, long-winded, self-absorbed post before, see: https://womenslegacyproject.com/finding-my-core/, and I highly recommend the occasional “detailed review” for bloggers and writers so they remember the how and why of events, and longer slices of time, and not just the what of recording brief descriptions in a date-book.
As perhaps you have noticed, I have a severe problem with completing tasks. I have always been afraid of judgment. Completion means I might be judged. I underachieved, procrastinated, and missed deadlines. This is the core impediment to my success, not ADHD, as I have been tempted to self-diagnose. I have a lot of ideas, constantly, and I do become distracted, but I know that with some structure, consistency, and plowing on through my fears, I can succeed.
So this time I am carrying through. I have promised, and promised myself to have my course on Legacy Blogging out by three different dates this year. Dammit. I am very close. I am doing a test run with a wonderful supportive friend of mine.
But, I am no longer lying to myself. I put a huge plan together and I am chipping away at and checking off bits by accomplishing parts of the plan. To finish and put the plan into action took far more energy and effort than I initially thought it would. Today, I am spelling it out for myself, and for you, if you are interested.
Large-scale Plan Stuff
- First, I set up a framework, an LLC, years and years ago.
- Then I decided to write my memoir. But I kept stumbling over which memoir to write. I have had a very interesting, multifaceted life. Memoirs need to be focused on one story, so I think I have at least 3 and as many as 5 books where I reminisce about different topics.
- To do this I had to learn how to sell, and create some buzz about what I was doing. I spent the Covid Years taking courses from a woman who a friend referred me to per the business of writing and selling online. I learned about how to craft for the persona to whom I was selling. I learned about funnels, testing my products, lead magnets, trip wires, upselling, and really just selling in general. It is not something that comes naturally to me. I worked information and reference desks for many years. Charging for information was alien and kind of “icky” in my book.
- I parted ways with that instructor after she essentially told me that
- only fools write books
- making money was where it was at
- I would never make money writing books
- I learned a bunch from her, but I soon realized I also needed to know about self-publishing as the Women’s Legacy Project was likely to need to self-publish several small books.
- I found the Write Publish Sell community, school, and summit. I just signed up for my third year of attending the summit. I now feel confident that I have all the necessary parts in my kit bag to start putting my business together in earnest.
- I also managed to tame some big, distracting monsters that nagged at me and occasionally jumped out and bit me. This was a big deal.
- My husband has been starting a business. He is an organic chemist (read: very smart. and distracted person), working in academia ( i.e. non-supportive, non-financially rewarding) and doing seminal work in neuro-chemistry developing glycopeptide drugs. He is finally closing in on seeing some rewards in this area. This takes some of his frustration away which takes some of my frustration away.
- I am also closing in on finally solving a family estate problem that has been eating away at me and denying me access to my inheritance for 15+ years. I had to file for a legal partition action against some of my family and joint land owners, and it has taken much time, money, and immense frustration to follow through on all the stages of this issue, including a great deal of psychic pain, bruising, and healing, and/or emotional wear-and tear on me. It is coming to a close and I can now look toward a time in the not too distant future when all that is behind me and I can let much old pain slip into the past.
- I am gaining so much peace from this resolution. It frees me in so many ways.
- SKILLS
- I already talked about learning necessary skills: selling online, and about the world of self-publishing.
- SUPPORT (non-financial)
- I have learned how to support myself, build a support network, in the last few years. I now ask for what I need, and set myself up to succeed as much as possible by building a supportive community around me, I continue to consciously create and maintain friendships.
- Group support. I have three small groups of which I am a part. One is a weekly co-working group, another is very small a writing group, and I try to attend two or three publishing-focused events a month (networking, skill building seminar, and inspirational presentation).
- Family support. I also talk to my daughter once a week for at least an hour. She lives just under a thousand miles from me; she inspires me.
- I also engage in Self support by giving myself what I can. This usually means significant down-time such as a slow transition into the day, a gym membership, a good, variable height desk (I am still assembling it), and getting the the computer tech and programs I need.
Nitty Gritty Smaller-scale Web Plan Stuff
I think of this level of task as the rabbit hole in the weeds. The less high-level a task is, the more likely I am to stumble over it, fall and get mired down in sticky, recursive gunk-filled rabbit-hole. I can never move on until I figure out the why of something, but sometimes there is no why. Sometimes two choices are equal. Sometimes I just have to make a decision because, as a friend from decades ago told me when I was dithering over something-or-other, “Not to make a decision is to make a decision.”
Below are all the things requiring attention per my website.
Which method for Website re-Design
I wandered around in circles for over a month trying to decide on a how to get a new look and structure for my website.
- use Divi or Elementor as the WordPress structure/framework for my website redesign?
- hire someone to just do it for me because I didn’t want to learn the ins and outs of a different framework?
- or upgrade to Genesis Pro with a child theme I liked the looks of and just do it myself as I have been using Genesis on my website for 10 years?
This proved to be an excruciatingly painful decision for me. I was anxious to point of being half-nauseous until I just decided to make a decision.
I decided to fork over the money for Genesis Pro and just go with what I know. I had decided several years ago to not learn about Divi for a potential client so why would I want to now? Same with Elementor, although I purchased several themes I liked from the guy who developed Elementor before it launched, and liked them. It also would be much cheaper to do it myself than to hire a designer who would want to , or would just go ahead and put in – without explicit permission – CSS or hand-coded HTML, so I would have to hire that person/company again to fix any problem that might develop in the future.
The decision was made – I am using Genesis Pro with a child theme from Studio Press. I had purchased lifetime access to all Studio Press themes when they were with Rainmaker before it crashed and burned. Studio Press was already associated with my web-hosting company, WP Engine, and I get great service with them because I know enough to ask semi-intelligent questions as well as because I am grandmothered in to having a bunch of sites for the price of just a few sites. Early adoption can be a good thing.
The child theme I have decided upon is Essence Pro Child. I love its ability (has been pre-coded) to use a featured image defined on a page or a post as a header background) and its simplicity which translates as clarity for the reader.
Balances costs and Savings
Spending more money on the Genesis Pro framework meant I should cut costs somewhere else. I decided to start using Constant Contact rather than Convert Kit for my email list and sign up forms and and to use elements of Constant Contact on landing pages I build myself rather than use Lead Pages. I unsubscribed or removed my renewal option for Convert Kit and Lead Pages. This will save me about $150 a year.
Of course doing the work myself means I will keep at least $1500 in my pocket. But I will have less time for other tasks.
Pages and Posts For The new site
One of the biggest projects for the new site is remaking landing pages for my course, lead magnet, and linkage to a tripwire. I have the new signup form linked and working. But geesh-oh-pete, I know there are a things I’ve missed. I want to spiff up the sales landing pages and make them look more professional.
All the posts have to be gone through with a fine-toothed comb and determine which posts go where.
It is a huge task to pare down and coherently update my categories, also have to optimize all my images for posts I intend to keep to free up storage space and load time, and I have three or four blogs’ worth of posts from the last 20 years that I need to winnow down, and just download and archive them. Of course all the old and new category labels and urls, storage places, titles of images, and the actual images associated with posts, and all this needs to be listed on a spreadsheet. I’m not very good with spreadsheets. But I will be after this is all over.
Scheduling Organization
Then there is the need to craft a scheduling page for social media accounts that will link blog posts, calls to action, and events, so I can figure out what I’ve done, and what remains to be done for each day, week, and month. And then there is the regular planning for and scheduling of posts well in advance that is absolutely necessary.
new and returning Features
I also have some new features I want to add and some old features I would like to resurrect. I want to start creating reels, and short youtube videos under the Legacy Lady moniker, I also want to bring back “This Month in Women’s Legacy,” and of course I need to determine my A to Z topic and construct the entries for the April 2024 Challenge. There is also a real need to present and explain what auto-ethnography is and why it is important for our society and culture.
Website functioning
Doing many of these things should increase page load and search speed. This revamp will reduce the size of my website, and reduce storage cost increases that will soon happen if I don’t address my blog bloat.
Video functionality for social media, and webinars and courses, per website linkage, also needs to be integrated into the website.
Other Stuff
And of course there is the life- beyond the website stuff that must be done.
- I need to plan a remodel connected to revamping heating and cooling in my home.
- I have to go through everything I own and downsize big-time.
- Then there are those books I need to write..