“The Power of Slow” –Interview with the Author

Christine Louise Hohlbaum is a recovering speedaholic who recognized the power of slow while one day eating ice cream with her then three-year-old daughter. Life is in the details. Don’t let it whiz by.

Christine’s new book, The Power of Slow: 101 Ways to Save Time in Our 24/7 World is being released this week. She was kind enough to make time in her schedule for an interview. This is a heavily edited version, you can read the entire interview on my website, Raw-Art-Journals.com

Christine Hohlbaum, author, mom, and expat.

Quinn: You are the mother of two school-age kids. “Slow” is not something I associate with busy moms. What made you decide to write the book?

Christine: Ironically, I dedicated my book to my two kids because they were my first teachers in slow. It is no secret that life changes when children arrive on the scene. They taught me that life can go at a slower pace and still be equally effective and productive. You see I am a recovering speed demon who used to think fast was the only tempo there was.

Quinn: Tell me what “slow” means in your world.

Christine: Slow means mindful living. It is embedded in the wisdom of choice. When we engage in the power of slow, we unleash shackled energy we have wasted stressing, rushing and worrying about things at a pace that obviously does not work for us.

Quinn: Most of us have to work to pay the bills and feed the family. How can we establish boundaries at work without losing our jobs?

Christine: Years ago my husband took a vacation, then lost his job right after. It was a frightening experience. It is important for employers to get on board with the notion that a well-rested worker is a productive one. Learning to say ‘no’ with kindness and clarity is something I talk a lot about in [the book].  When we say ‘no’ to others, we say ‘yes’ to ourselves. I find formulations such as “Here’s what I can do” and “I have an idea that might improve this even more” help sustain your boss or client’s listening far better than a flat-out ‘no’. Offer alternatives and constructive advice.

Quinn: Women are often the caretakers of both young children and older parents, squashing their time into ridiculous expectations. What advice do you have for the “sandwich generation” of women?

Christine: We women are indeed pulled in many directions at once. Learning to take ‘me-time’ is mission critical when you are a caretaker. Celebrate the ‘ma’, a Japanese term referring to the space between things. Plan your activities such that you have ten or fifteen minutes between them. Back-to-back action is often draining and over the long-term will wear you down. Bring back the ‘ma’ in me.

Quinn: People seem to take some pride in being “crazy busy.” Any danger in that?

Christine: I have noticed that ‘busy’ is the new fine. What I mean by that is people respond to ‘How are you?’ with ‘busy’ or ‘crazy busy’ much more often than the old stand-by ‘fine!’ Busy implies you are successful, but I would caution that activity does not always equal productivity.

Quinn: Are there any rules worth breaking in the standard time management advice? (Keep a to-do list, prioritize it into A, B, C-level tasks, tackle all the A-level first, etc.)

Christine: Oh, how I LOVE this question! Surely, the Eisenhower principle that helps you discern urgent from important tasks is a key strategy, and I talk about it in the book. Fundamentally, however, it is about your personal relationship with time itself. I do not believe in time management. First, time is an organizing principle we established to make sense of our live so it is a construct based on mutual agreement. Second, we cannot manage or control time. We can only manage or control the things we do within the time that we have.

Altered Book: Fahrenheit 451

The Big Read is an idea sponsored by the Valley’s libraries. Each year a book is chosen and libraries sponsor events to encourage people to read that book. One of the events involves artists–I was one of the artists chosen to alter the book for a display at one of the libraries. This year’s book is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

What makes the book interesting is that the 1953-written book has elements of  current reality–a society obsessed by television and celebrities, a fear of intellectual discussions at social functions, a minority kicking up a fuss about books, which are subsequently banned from libraries, and my favorite, a love of wearing earbuds and being plugged in to programmed music.

In my approach to altering the book, I chose the idea from the final scene of the book, in which people become living books. Readers live in books, so I created a row-house made of books. In the image below, the central house is Fahrenheit 451, surrounded by other book houses.The pages of the central book are stuffed with message tags.

Altered book, Fahrenheit 451. © Quinn McDonald, 2009

Each house represents a genre: mystery, science fiction, art and poetry. Because love of nature was banned in the story, the two houses on the left represent winter and spring, and the two books on the left represent summer and fall.

Altered book detail, left side © Quinn McDonald, 2009

Altered book right-side detail. © Quinn McDonald, 2009

The tags are all quotes about books, all  from famous people. Ray Bradbury’s own quote, “You don’t have to burn books to destory a culture, Just get people to tstop reading them,”  is there, as well as Salman Rushdie’s quote, “A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.”

Detail of book tags, © Quinn McDonald, 2009

In the heart of the book (I chose page 98 deliberately, as 98.6 Fahrenheit is the normal temperature of the human body), there are flames on one side and a matchbook on the other. The matchbook has a burning match on the cover, and the inside “matches” are the spines of books that have been banned in the past.

Right side detail, matchbook © Quinn McDonald, 2009

The matchbook itself is surrounded by paper flames that have already consumed the page of the book.

The tags are removable for easy reading, and can be used as bookmarks. I hope the book is displayed in a way that allows people to touch it and play with it.

Banned books as matches, detail of altered book, © Quinn McDonald, 2009

I read the book when I was about 10 and just discovering science fiction. My first big literary shock was discovering that Bradbury had made a mistake, paper bursts into flame at 451 Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Yes, I stuck a piece of paper in the oven to see it burst into flame.

It took me a long while to accept altered books. The thought of ruining a book was overwhelming. But the lure of transforming a book that was scheduled for the shredder into a piece of art won me over.

The satisfaction of planning out a concept and carrying it through was really satisfying. I am honored to have been chosen for this project. And yes, I do custom altered books to honor a special event or person.

–—Quinn McDonald is a life- and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write and give presentations. She also teaches people who can’t draw how to keep an art journal.

Journal Reviews: Variety for Journalers

Karen Doherty of Exaclair, Inc. in New York was kind enough to send me four journals for review. They have websites at Exaclair and Quo Vadis. They were four nice-looking, thick journals. All are about 8.5 inches tall and 5.5 inches wide. They varied from 3/4 inches thick to 3/8 inches thick.

Left to right: Rhodia, Exacompta, Clairefontaine (unlined), Clairefontaine (lined)

I tested the pages by writing on each page with a fountain pen, a thin Sharpie (the one guaranteed not to bleed through), and a Sharpie fine-point permanent marker. I also used Derwent Inktense watercolor pencils and water to test each journal. People use journals differently, and it’s good to know how each one will stand up to the use you will purchase it for.

The orange Rhodia journal (far left, the color is tangerine, not as pale as shown) has a leather-like cover. It has a comfy, cushy feel.

It has a ribbon marker and an elastic closure, a great feature if you toss your journal into a bag.The paper is lined in light blue and the Rhodia logo is on the bottom of reach right-hand page. Paper is 90g/m, 96 pages. The book is made for writing, not drawing, and doesn’t easily open perfectly flat. The pages are ultra-smooth, almost slick, which comes from hot calendering, or passing them through big, hot rollers under pressure to finish them.  Writing on the page is comfortable, although the fountain pen takes a while to dry. That makes it better for right-handed people than left-handed.

Rhodia pages are ultra-smooth

Neither of the writing pens soaked through, although you can clearly see the writing from the reverse side of the page. I wouldn’t write on both sides of the pages with a fountain pen. The Sharpie permanent marker did soak through, and left spots on the next page as well. The watercolor pencils went down well, and when I painted over them, the water didn’t soak in quickly. It did not cockle (wrinkle or buckle) the page seriously after a day, although it did at first.  When dry, the back of the page was very slightly buckled, but not enough to cause a problem. Surprisingly, once the water dried, the watercolor pencil strokes were still visible, it didn’t blend well.

The Exacompta had 100 pages of 100g/m paper. It’s a heavier paper, slightly ivory, with a laid finish. It looks mould-made, a watermark you can see on each page. The book itself has a sturdy paper cover and the page-edges are silver. It came with a removable leather-like protective cover with “Sketch Book” stamped on it discreetly. When the book is closed it looks expensive, with the silver edged paper. It has a ribbon marker, no elastic closure.

Heavier Exacompta paper is perfect for watercolor and ink

The Exacompta lies flat when open, making it an idea sketchbook. The writing inks did not soak through, so you can write or sketch on both sides of the page. The watercolor pencils blended well, with no buckling on either side of the page once dry. The Sharpie permanent marker did soak through in spots, but left no marks on any other pages.

The two Clairefontaines were very different, which is sure to please a wider variety of customers. Both are stitch-bound and lie flat when opened. The multi-colored cover one is unlined, with smooth,  bright white pages. These pages are also calendared, which gives the paper a smooth finish, without a “tooth.” (Tooth creates a slight drag for pencils, and is generally preferred by artists.) The paper is lighter in weight, I’d guess it at 90g/m. The fountain pen takes about 45 seconds to become smear-proof, although the Sharpie writing pen dries faster. The Sharpie permanent marker soaks through and leaves some marks on the third page as well. If you use pen and ink or watercolor, you won’t want to work on both sides of the pages, although there is no visible buckle to the paper when dried.

Clairefontaine Red-cover journal can handle watercolor

The Clairfontaine red-cover uses lined paper. The paper is white, and again, I’d guess 90g/m. It has a slight drag on pens, which is vital for “fast writing,” a Natalie Goldberg term that I use to describe a journal that’s comfortable to write in. I believe this is the journal used by Julia Child when she was in Paris at the Cordon Bleu. A fountain pen dries quickly, and with the flat-lying book, this can be used by either right- or left-handed people. The Sharpie permanent bleeds through and marks on the third page. The water color blends well, and there is no buckle on either side of the page when dry. A good journal for writers who may occasionally sketch.

Necessary disclosures: I paid for none of these journals, they were donated. I will pass them on to people who take my journaling classes and can’t afford a good journal.

Of the four journals, I liked the Exacompa the best. And not because of the lovely silver gilt-edged pages, but because of the weight and tooth of the papers. I have a strong preference for unlined, heavy-weight pages. And I have a strong aesthetic preference for mould-made papers. My journals have to stand up to some abuse–heavy use, being carried in a purse or backpack. they also have to stand up to fountain pens, watercolor pencils and Pitt Pens–permanent markers that generally don’t bleed through heavier papers.

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and certified creativity coach. She teaches people how to write and give presentations. She also  manages four journals that travel the world.

When the Circle of Life is a Noose

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, the blogger who runs babyonbored, is a mother who is no longer drinking. She’s also written at least three books, celebrating the grind of baby-raising,  the most recent one:  It’s not Me, It’s You, falls, according to the New York Times, into the “antiperfection mom-lit” world. A bold new category.

I am relieved that there is such a category. I am sad that it did not exist 20, 40 or 60 years ago, when it was just as necessary as today.

Stefanie Wilder-Taylor's book for today's moms

Wilder-Taylor writes with the acerbic, honest style we have come to admire and expect of the women we blazed the trail for. We were the generation who felt the same despair, the same fear, the same inadequacy. We sat on our stoops drinking chardonnay out of sippy cups,  frightened and alone, wondering what had happened to our identities. We were “Jimmy’s mom” or “Darla’s mom” and we wore shirtwaists when we felt we wanted to belong and blue jeans when we did not.

We looked at photos of moms with a baby held softly to her breast, her face a picture of composure. The baby was blond and mom had long, perfect hair falling over the nursing breast, as they sat in the shade of a big oak, protected and safe. Both baby and mom were swathed in white eyelet. Motherhood was nothing like that for us. We had on damp, sour-smelling button-front blouses. Underneath were bulky nursing bras, also damp from spurting milk. Our nipples were raw and the baby was screaming. Our hair was unwashed and smeared with our tears and the baby’s snot. We knew we were inadequate mothers.

We were alone in the suburbs. Just out of college, where our career choices were limited to secretary, nurse, or teacher  we had not wanted any of those. Marriage was a chance to get out of our parents’ house before they could guilt us into staying to serve an endless row of TV dinners on plastic tray tables. We had wandered out in search of that wonderful man who would support us, babies who would delight us, and a life spent in the delights of being a “homemaker,” the highest goal a woman could aspire to.

We’ d been lied to. Homemaking was a boring stupor of cleaning, washing, folding, ironing and cooking, which repeated in endless cycles. We then braved the men’s world,  walking into the places we could find identities, we were scorned by both the men and our friends.

The surprise is that the men were not interested in seeing “the little woman” in a business role. We struggled with emotions that promised that the cute girl got the cute guy, using the same “teddy-bear tricks” we’d used in college. It didn’t move us up the ladder of success; more often we were bedded down instead of helped up. Mentoring was for men. The other women in the workplace looked like friends, but were competitors.

Unlike Taylor-Wilder, we did not have the support of strangers that Wilder-Taylor got from her blog–”People have been loving me right through the Internet,” she says of the help.  Instead, we were the generation exemplified by June Carter (as played by Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line), confronted by an angry store clerk for leaving her first husband. “I can’t imagine your parents still talking to you. You are an abomination,” hissed the angry woman. “I’m so sorry I disappointed you,” answers June, an answer that would be impossible today.

When I tell younger women that I was sent home from work for wearing a 3-piece, long-sleeved pants suit, they laugh. When I tell younger women that I was fired from my job when I got married, and from another when I got pregnant, they think I’m joking. But it happened, and not so long ago.

Most of us felt alone. When Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room hit the market around 1978, most of us

Marilyn French's book came out in 1978

read it with recognition, relief, and hope. Thirty years passed between the two books. Both point to a society that hasn’t done much to solve the serious problems women face as both the breadwinner and the caretaker. We’ve come around full circle. There are women CEOs, women in politics and medicine. And women in despair, holding their babies. Feminism was forgotten, written off as a phase of bra-burning. It’s time to bring it back. As a real-life approach to helping women and men create a stronger bond at work and at home.

Note: Marilyn French died in May of 2009.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. You can see her business site at QuinnCreative.com and visit her art journaling site at Raw-Art-Journals.com (c) QuinnCreative 2009 All rights reserved.

Book Review: The Mystic Arts. .

. . . .wait, before you think it’s a mystical novel, it’s not. Charlie Huston’s The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death: A Novel, is not mystical. It’s pulp noir, violent and not always easy to read.

Charlie Huston's book cover for Mystic Arts. . .

Slacker Webster Goodhue is forced to get a job to pay off breaking a borrowed cell phone. He stumbles into a job as a crime scene cleaner. You’ll find out more about this job than you might want to know–how to clean brain splatter off a wall, how to get body fluids out of the carpet, particularly if the victim died weeks ago and has been lying on the carpet. You’ll discover that in this part of LA, people commit suicide in more grisly ways than overdosing. No, no, they blow their brains out with a mouthful of water to increase the force of the explosion, and that isn’t the worst of it.

So Webster doesn’t exactly have a career position, but the owner of the company, Po-Sin, has ambitions. So do the rival crime-scene gangs, er, companies. Expect violence that no one wants to clean up, including kidnapping, extortion, mayhem and, ass-whupping.

What is it about? Well, you know, Web sees girl (Soledad, who comes attached with brother Jamie, who’s in trouble), Web loses girl (almonds, kidnapping, and her father’s suicide), Web gets in lots of trouble through Soledad, human smuggling, rival gangs, and Web gets girl again, sort of.

If that isn’t enough to keep you reading, there is another whole story of Web’s parents (his mom is a rich hippie, his dad is a drunk script-repairman) and his background–he used to teach school until a student got killed and Web wound up with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

If this whole turmoil is not enough, the book has lots of dialog and no quotation marks or “he said”s. Still enjoyable in a Tarantino kind of way. Definitely pulp noir, not for the squeamish.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach who trains people in communications with family and business partners.

Snark: the book

David Denby, film critic for the New Yorker, is tired of all the sniping, the pointless, the mean, the vapid spew of anger that passes as writing today. He wrote a book about it: Snark.

Illustration from "The Hunting of the Snark"

The word comes from various sources. One dictionary says it blends “snide” and “remark,” another one points to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.” There are sailboats, missiles and minor characters in novels that are snarks. (The minor character is in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22) but in Denby’s book, it is always mean and cruel.

I’m not overly surprised to see how common snark has become. The anonymity of social networking sites and emails (on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,) allows us to be mean without responsibility. We don’t have to say it in person or show ourselves,  so the bar to decency is lowered considerably.

The popularity of reality shows lies in the “mean girl”snark–the bullying insults that we secretly wish we could hurl at the person who was mean to us. We get that vicarious pleasure in someone else’s bad behavior, that emotional schadenfreude of a rush, guilt-free, from those shows.  After endless seasons of escalating backstabbing in the kitchen, bedroom, hot tub, dress-making studio and home remodel, “shocking” has numbed us down to acceptance.

Oddly enough, I can appreciate sarcasm, irony, parody and wit. But snark takes them all out for a walk, then mugs them and tells them they don’t have a sense of humor. Snark hurts.

I think it may be time to put down the glee in gossip, and recognize that winning is not everything, or the only thing, but a time in our life we can really show how big we are. Reality shows would collapse, and we’d have to rediscover a real sense of humor. Personally, I’m ready for it.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach who runs workshops in communicating at work, at home, and to strangers.

Book Review: Make Your Own Journal

Making Journals by Hand
20 Creative Projects for Keeping Your Thoughts
By Jason Thompson
Paperback, 128 pages

Jason Thompson's book

This book is a visual and exploratory joy. While I love using journals, and even enjoy making them, I’m always defeated by complicated instructions which require rigorous measuring, exact rule following and complicated tools. Luckily, this books skips all that.

It does start with the obligatory gathering of appropriate tools and materials, but even those photos look inviting instead of daunting.
By page 12, you are into the good stuff. Thompson divides his book into two major sections: projects and techniques. It’s a good idea, as some people love to walk away with a completed travel journal (p. 32) and some prefer to learn the “how-to” part and then strike out on their own.

Read the rest of this review. . .

Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. You’ll find regular book reviews on this blog. You can find the full list of book and CD reviews on her website.

Book Review: Making Memory Books

Making Memory Books by Hand: 22 Project To Make, Keep and Share
by Kristina Feliciano.

by Kristina Feliciano

This is one of those books that you buy when you are feeling covered in glue and clumsy, too confused to go on with your projects. The book is stuffed with colored photos, and illustrations of real hand-made books. They are called memory books, but they aren’t the kit-assembled scrapbooks that stuff the aisles of stores, these are handmade with heartfelt choices. Some are rustic, with torn pages and lots of handwriting. Some are polished with wood covers. All are worth looking at. Some are worth drooling over.

The  128-page paperback opens with a basic tutorial on paper and equipment and some basic assembly instructions, enough so you could make some of the projects in the book.

After the basic instructions, it helps to have some experience with accordion folds and coptic spine stiching to complete other projects. The book is not meant to be a tutorial on coptic stitching–there are not instructions for that–but that doesn’t diminish the book in the least. There is enough inspiration to fill weeks with your own creative work.

There are different sections, including Travel, Special Events, and Family, but each book can be adapted to your use.

–Quinn McDonald is a life coach and certified creativity coach. She reviews books for the Amazon.com Vine project.

CD Review: Snakeskin Violin

If you are a World Music fan or a blues fan, or better yet, both, you are in for a treat. Markus James has reached into the roots of Blues, into the instruments and vocal of West Africa and created a CD worth listening to.

Read the review (and see a n’goni)  here.

–Quinn McDonald, a writer and certified creativity coach, reviews music and books on her website, QuinnCreative.com

Snakeskin Violin, Markus James

Music Review: Into Silence, Deva Premal

There are times when I feel scrambly. That’s the word I made up to describe a feeling of doing too much at the same time, reaching for too many files, not getting priorities straight. Characterized by rotating slowly in place thinking, “I must. . .but first. . .no, this. . . ” It’s not a good feeling, it makes you feel as if someone has put your thoughts in a blender and pushed ‘liquify.’

Scrambly times demand a good music background, and I’ve found Deva Premal to be the person whose music calms me down, even when I don’t want to. Continue reading the review.