The Story Behind Alice Osborn’s Poetry

April 21, 2012 by 2 Comments

Photo credit: Marthanna Yater

What’s the story behind my poetry? I thought it was only fair to spend a little time talking about new book, After the Steaming Stops available now for $10 till the end of April! Read some of my poems here.

I also want you to check out this video (only 2:30 minutes!) from Diogenes Ruiz of Entertainment Triangle which also reveals the “why” behind my poetry.

Let’s get this party started:

Where did my book title (After the Steaming Stops) come from?

From an Aunt Jemima waffle box—if you check out the instructions on the back you’ll see some of the boxes say, “Bake until the steaming stops” after you’ve poured the batter into a hot waffle iron.  I love to make waffles on Sunday mornings and came across this phrase—and thought, “how intriguing.” I changed it to “After the Steaming Stops,” to reveal what happens after the anger and after the love is gone. Many of my poems use domestic imagery and I also wanted the title to have an element of danger—which is steaming. Steam will burn you and it can also melt your love. Love is represented by the frozen popsicle heart that’s being lowered via ladle into the pressure cooker. In this case steam, one of the three states of water, is a metaphor for love in my book. Some love is solid (you know it’s unconditional), some liquid (it flows all around you and you know it’s there), some is steam (it’s in the vapors and you don’t know if it really even exists).

 

What are these poems really about?After the Steaming Stops

 

All of my poems are stories, or narrative poems, about love’s flare-ups and endings. They are mostly true stories of what happened to me as a three-, eight -or ten-year old and how inappropriate my parents acted with me. As a kid, I remembered these incidents, locked them into my head so one day I could write about them. All of the quotations from my folks are real. Some poems weigh more on the father than the mother to give them equal time and I’m sympathetic with both. I also love to write about death! I also have two historical poems about a near death and a death and how they affected me. My poem “Early” is about a train engineer who kills someone on the tracks just because he was doing his job. I got the idea from that poem by reading the paper. The article said that over the course of a train operator’s career, they will kill three people on average.

 

What makes my poetry stand out?

 

My endings! I like to give readers an unexpected punch in the final line. I use stories and images that will stay in your brain for years (so sorry about that!) and many of my poems include my dry sense of humor, too. My poetry is very accessible and easy to understand BUT the more you read my poetry, you’ll discover more layers and more intrigue!

 

Your Turn:

What else would you like to know about me or my poetry? Please add your comments here!

 

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What is the Real Secret of Networking?

April 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

How much should you networking? How much is too much or too little? Regular contributor Dave Baldwin shares his insights on networking based on his own experiences and upon reading Great by Choice by Jim Collins. Enjoy and hope you leave here today with a renewed sense of where networking fits into your business.

In 2007, when I first discovered the concept of networking, I was excited. I saw that the human race had yet to discover its greatest potential. I realized that the world we live in was built not by great individual accomplishments, but by networks of people collectively committed to things greater than they were. It was not one lone individual that gave birth to the United States, for example. It was a group of people who devoted their mortal existence to the genesis of a new world. That is what networking is all about.

Jim Collins recently released a new book called Great by Choice. He examines companies that started out small in tumultuous environments, but managed to weather the storm. He refers to these companies as “10X-ers,” because every single one of these companies outperformed the general stock market by a factor of ten times. These companies were pioneers, rebellious by nature and fanatical about their core values. I asked myself: could mere mortals like me apply these 10X-er principles to networking?

For right now, I’ll just highlight one of the 10X-er habits that Collins places in the limelight: the “20-Mile March.” This habit simply amounts to identifying an aggressive-but-sustainable pace, and exercising the discipline to stick to it every day no matter what. By contrast, the poorly-performing companies in Collins’s study grew like kudzu on steroids, only to collapse like botched soufflés. They over-exerted themselves and burned up resources frivolously when they had the wind at their backs, and they retreated when the weather got rough. The 10X-ers, on the other hand, kept driving forward on bad days—and exercised the discipline to pace themselves on good days.

In 2007, when I first discovered the concept of networking, I did not approach it like a 10X-er. I jumped on the idea like a toddler in a candy store. My networking plan was simple: go everywhere and meet with everybody! I set up an account with Meetup.com, and within a week, I joined over 40 different Meetup groups. Sometimes, I would attend three Meetup events in one day. Shortly after this, I encountered business networking groups and did the same thing. I showed up for every business networking group I could find. When the going got rough and money started to run short, I pulled back and almost completely stopped networking altogether.

At the root of my inconsistent behavior was a lack of clear purpose. I made a habit of asking people to meet me for coffee “so that we could get to know each other’s businesses and see how we can help each other.” I sometimes made special trips all the way across town to meet with people without a well-defined purpose. Many times, I had one-on-one meetings with people that I never saw or heard from again. When I took an honest look at what I was really doing, I saw that my real goal was to feel accepted by people. The feeling of acceptance took hold of me like a drug, and I kept coming back for more until I could no longer afford my habit. I think that the underperforming companies in Collins’s study probably suffered from a similar addiction to growth.

If there’s one thing I took away from reading Great by Choice, it’s that discipline is quite different than I thought. I used to think that discipline was about forcing myself to do more when I felt like doing less. However, that’s only possible for short periods of time. The 10X-ers showed me that discipline is actually the opposite. Champions do less when they feel like doing more. Weight-lifters, for example, are known to stop when they’ve reached their prescribed number of reps for the day, even if they feel like they could do two extra sets. High performance begins with conserving excess energy and resources for when they’ll be needed later.

How does this apply to networking? In the world of networking, high performance comes over time as the result of doing just the right amount and no more. There comes a point of diminishing returns, after which it’s time to stop networking and get back to work. I exceeded this threshold by a long-shot, and I paid a price for it. Strategic networking, on the other hand, is about creating a long-term vision with short-term objectives and seeking out the specific people who can help make the vision a reality. The real art of networking is creating win-win relationships both in the long term and the short term. It takes practice to achieve mastery in networking, just like playing the piano or oil painting. Slow and steady wins the race.

At the time of this writing, I have three major networking events that I have scheduled into my calendar every week. I attend Toastmasters on Thursdays, BNI on Fridays, and my Pay it Forward group on Tuesdays. Any time I look at the possibility of adding something else, I ask myself how it will support my specific objectives. I also ask if I’d be willing to give up a networking opportunity to make room for it. If I wouldn’t, it’s probably not worth it.

Dave Baldwin is a writer who lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina. He facilitates a networking group in Wake Forest, North Carolina.

 

 

 

 

 

Your Turn:

How much networking is too much? How much is too little? And how much is “just right?”

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What’s So Transformative About Transformative Writing Anyway?

April 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Today we welcome author Pat MacEnulty who currently hails from Charlotte, NC. Enjoy this post about transformative writing–multi-layered writing that not only can change society, but the individual. Pat will also be coming to Wonderland Book Club in March 2013.
I had tea with a poet yesterday afternoon at a local coffee shop, and he wanted to know what I meant when I spoke of “transformative writing.” He assumed it meant writing that would have a transformative effect on our society. I explained that was exactly what I meant–and more.

To me the transformation is multi-layered. The first layer is transforming experience itself into art. When we write, we are not writing in a vacuum. We base our work on the material we have at hand. And we transform that material — just as coal is transformed into fuel or pieces of highly-organized carbon are transformed into shiny diamonds — into something else. We dig the material out of life, or we find it abandoned by the roadside, or someone drops it in our laps. We put the various elements we have together in our own unique way, and voila we create a work of art. 

Secondly, the writer is transformed. When we investigate the raw materials of our art through the lens of a character, we see it differently. Even when we are writing memoir or personal essays or in our journal, we take the substance of life and hold it up to the light. We learn something. We explore, we discover. We may simply have a greater understanding about ourselves or our situations, or we may change at some very deep level within ourselves. For example, when I wrote about my father’s memorial service, I was still bitter about the way he had treated me and my brothers. I wrote about the details of the service, about the conversations I had with my brothers, about the walk along the beach that I took that morning with them. By the time I got to the end of the story, I understood that I may not have had much of a father but I had something better: I had these two wonderful older brothers who knew me and loved me and who shared my life. My bitterness was transformed into gratitude.

Third, the reader or listener is transformed. Stories shape us. They help us to know the world outside of our limited perspectives. We work our empathy muscles. Here is a piece that Jennifer Huang wrote at the Winter Writers’ Retreat at Sevenoaks:

Writing is telling Tommy (my best friend) my hellish weekdays and my rides to the park, sometimes to run and sometimes just to sit and stare; and anyways, running and staring usually leads to writing. Writing is telling him how I like the feeling of velvet beneath my fingers and the pressing of pianos. Writing is him telling me that his parents don’t pay attention at all. He speaks of his car rides to school, his friends endlessly talking about nothing at all. Writing is him telling me that he wishes for something more but cannot describe it. Writing is our friendship, meshed and tidied into a bundle of letters, some turning yellow and others crisp and white. It is the box beneath my bed, exploding with laughter and tears and frustration that can somehow be heard even as I try to avoid them.

As they write to each other, Tommy and Jennifer deepen the friendship between them. They are transformed with every letter they write and every letter they read.

The fourth, but not the final, layer of transformation is societal. It is the third level writ large. I meet so many people in my workshops who are working in the trenches of our society. They are the ones who witness. They work in Washington D.C. and travel through the labyrinth of a system designed to defeat the underfunded; they do environmental work and confront the daily destructions of the greed machine; they spend their days with autistic children and explore the effects of our toxic world; they know what it’s like to be abducted, to lose children, to be widowed, to care so much they bleed. In writing, they have a tool to educate, to transform others, to open our eyes and maybe crack open a heart here and there.

What would Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath have been without the final scene? That example of compassion in the face of desperation is one of the most moving scenes in literature. And I believe that the final scene where Rose of Sharon performs her act of kindness is the one that enabled this work of art to transform a country. The rest of the book opened our eyes. The final scene opened our hearts. 

The way we can get to that fourth level of transformation is to search our own lives for the intersections between the personal and the societal (or political). My friend, the poet I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, is interested in writing a book about what it means to be masculine. This is an important question in our culture as we evolve and as gender roles bend, stretch, and sometimes bounce back. For him, it’s also a personal question — one that he grapples with in his work as a therapist and in his own interactions with other men. 

There is one more layer of transformation that I believe is important — the spiritual level, which I will write more about next time.

In the meantime, here are some things to think about:

1. Make a list of the books, poems, essays, stories, etc. that you have found transformative. How did they change you? How did they affect your world view? What were the words, the lines, the passages, or the scenes that opened your heart?

2. Try the “Writing About What Matters” exercise. Where in your life does the personal intersect with the societal? This question was the impetus for me to write about taking care of my elderly mother. My personal situation was reflected in some of the questions I had about our society: How do we treat our elderly? What happens when someone no longer “contributes” to society in a tangible way? What resources are there for caregivers? How do we juggle all the demands on our time and attention? So take a look at your own life. What are your pressing personal concerns? Are these concerns that others have to face in some way? And how do our national policies and/or our society mores affect those concerns?

3. Interview someone! I interviewed Ina May Gaskin, the mother of modern midwifery. I had no idea how the medicalization of the birth process has affected the birth experience in such a negative way — even to the point of sometimes causing maternal deaths. You can read the interview in the January 2012 issue of The Sun Magazine. I later turned that information into this essay about that intersection of personal and public.


About Pat:
Pat MacEnulty‘s most recent title Wait Until Tomorrow: A Daughter’s Memoir has been nominated for the 2012 SIBA Nonfiction Book Award. Her other books include the novels From May to December, Time to Say Goodbye, Picara, and Sweet Fire as well as the short story collection The Language of Sharks. Her essays, interviews, stories, and poetry have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Sun and Gargoyle. Pat has delivered writing workshops at Esalen, Rowe Conference Center, the New York Open Center, the TWA Conference, Sevenoaks Retreat Center, and the San Miguel Writers Conference. She also speaks about writing at colleges, high schools, and libraries. Currently an Associate Professor at Johnson & Wales University, Pat holds a Ph.D. from the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University where she received a Kingsbury Fellowship and a University Dissertation Fellowship. The recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the State of Florida, Pat is currently completing her book on transformative writing. She also blogs here about transformative writing.
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