A (tiny) space of your own

No matter how small and cramped your living quarters, you need a space to call all your own. It’s a sacred space you keep for your dreams, your hopes, the tending of your creativity.

That space becomes your spiritual and mental safe space, a place where you can feel what you need to feel, have bold dreams, write, doodle, hum, sing, or just be. It’s the place where you safely are a human being, not a human doing. That space becomes the place where you simply are. With yourself and your dreams.

Woven light

This space doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. It can be a comfortable chair, a desk, a card table, a pillow on the floor. It can be by a window, in a cool dark room, in a corner of the kitchen. The important thing is that it has to be yours and yours alone.

To this space you bring your problems to think them over, your projects to daydream about, your mind to clear out. And you use the space in a ritual way. You never approach it without mindful consideration–this is where my soul rests, this is where my energy is stored, this is where I can have whatever thought I want, or no thoughts at all.

When you come to your space, you come with hope. You might be troubled or angry, but when you come to your space, you come with the realization that anything can happen, that you can be healed or inspired, quieted or charged. Your space can be all that and more.

In my apartment, my sacred space was a chair with a footstool and reading light. It was not my desk, where there was always work to be done. It was not my bed into which I dropped in exhaustion. My chair was where I chose to sit and dream, read, or just be.

In my new house, there is a premium on space. My art spot is a place in the guest room; I do my business work in the dining room filled with bookcases and a desk. But even though I have two places that allow me to express myself, I still have a sacred space–a chair with a footstool and a good reading light next to a window that will let in direct light in winter. It’s a place without a way for people to contact me–no computer, no phone. But a way for me to contact other worlds–read books, sink into meditation. It doesn’t look like anyone else’s sacred space. To one of our cats, it looks like a good place to sleep uninterrupted. But to me, it is the place where all peace starts, where I can let go of all the things I have to be and do, and where, for a small part of every day, I can just be.

[Read a 10-step tutorial on daydreaming.]

–Quinn McDonald is a daydreamer and night-dreamer, and who captures her dreams in a chair by a window. She is a writer and certified creativity coach. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Grace Under Pressure

The hard part of the move is over. The van is loaded, the extra van is loaded too and the gift of lessons has been presented.

What’s a “gift of lessons”? Life often takes interesting, unexpected twists. They are generally not fun. If we learn quickly from them, we can adjust and move ahead. If we fight the lesson, refuse to see it, insist it isn’t there, demand it to go away, it will still be there, but we will be exhausted and miserable.

Figuring out how to navigate those life lessons to get the nourishment and leave the stress is a rare gift. I had one of those gifts yesterday, during the height of the move. We had rented the largest van available. The plan was to load it and use the extra space to move the motorcycles. A friend built a special rack.

When you figure out how much of a van you need, you use calculators that ask for room size, special furniture (gym equipment, big screen TVs) and other bulky items. No calculator ever asks if you have books. They simply assume you have about 10 pounds of books. After giving away hundreds of books, I had hundreds more. Books that make good reading, art books, instruction books. The van filled quickly.

At first I thought it was a matter of deciding what to take and what to leave behind. But it wasn’t. The only choice was to rent another van. That wasn’t in the plan. It was more than I’d budgeted for. In a wonderful flash of understanding, I realized that it didn’t matter what I had planned, the reality was right in front of me–rent another van. The van in the driveway was full, the motorcycles weren’t in it yet, and there was still furniture in the house.

Much as I hated the option, it was the only really workable one. Even after careful pruning, there was too much I owned already loaded in the van. No use beating myself up, no beating myself up for not knowing (how could I have known?), simply quick and direct action–finding an available van and bringing it back. I did it.

And my reward? Less stress. A feeling of making a necessary decision. A feeling of mastery over my emotions. (Want to feel a lack of control? Do a cross-country move.) We can not control the occasional smelly fish-head life tosses at us. But we are in total control of the decision-making process and the reaction we have. We can choose to be angry, yell, make unreasonable demands, engage in attention-grabbing drama.

Or, we can cut the drama, control our emotions and move on. Doesn’t get as much attention, but gets the job done. The American author Ernest Hemingway (whose books are in the van), defined courage as “grace under pressure.” Choosing to make the best decision at hand now is not always easy, but it opens the road ahead for smoother travel.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. She is moving cross country with more than 500 books, a husband and three cats. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

First Books by Unknown Authors

Sure, you know about summer reading. Light books with slamming plots, maybe a bodice-buster or two. Easy to read, sort of like potato chips for the mind.

May I make another suggestion? I’ve had enormous luck reading the first books of authors I’ve never heard of. It started with Khaled Hosseini’s book, The Kite Runner. As a first novel, it was a stunner on a topic I usually don’t read in fiction–war. But it wasn’t about war, it was about painful personal growth and understanding, told in an irresistible way.

Cover, The God of Animal by Aryn Kyle

After that, I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. There is something about the truth of first-time novelists. This is, somehow, their story. The second novel is the one they feel they have to write. The first one is the one that has to be written. And it makes it incredibly powerful, raw, real.

The Secret Life of Bees is the first novel from non-fiction writer Sue Monk Kidd, so I’m not sure it counts, but it has that same compelling quality of reality and breath-taking writing.

Some first novels are incredible, they stand alone. Can you name anything Margaret Mitchell wrote after Gone With the Wind? Or To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee?

My latest find is The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle. A powerful book on love, horses, poverty, marriage gone awry, and coming of age. I’m not a horse lover, but this book still held me captive. Well written and timed, the ending was perfect for a first novel. In my mind, it would make a great movie, which I won’t go see for reasons that would spoil the plot line. I did see the movie of Kite Runner and enjoyed it. I needed to learn that many movies based on books are wonderful if you go to see them as movies, and don’t expect the book.

If this good luck streak of first novel continues, my summer reading may run well into fall.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer of non-fiction and a reader of fiction. She is a certified creativity coach who is moving to Arizona.

It Is What It Is. Except When It’s Not.

“It is what it is,” goes the latest business buzzword. Sounds profound, until you start to think about it. The profundity comes from the Biblical description of God speaking to Moses when Moses asked for His name. “I am that I am,” the Bible says.

Or, perhaps more irreverently, Popeye, of spinach-eating fame, used similar words to describe the inevitability of his condition, “I yam what I yam.”

After listening to about 500 repetitions of the phrase, I’ve discovered several meanings. Most commonly it means, “Drop the subject,” followed closely by, “I don’t care, and I’m not talking about it any more.” It is

Iroquois false face mask from www.snowgoose.ca

clearly a conversational door-closer.

In a few other variations, it can mean, “I don’t care,” “interpret it any way you want,” and “things aren’t going to change.” Occasionally it means, “Because I said so, that’s why.”

“It” is never defined, but I’m of the opinion that ‘it’ is hardly ever what it is. Otherwise, we’d define it. ‘It’ might be what it seems, or ‘it’ might be what I want it to be, which is different from what you want.

One person breaking off a relationship with another and not motivated to give a reason will sigh and say, “It is what it is.” In that case, it has replaced the kinder, “It’s not you, it’s me.” The poor pronoun, no one will name it.

For all the different uses, the real meaning is one of laziness or confusion. We use “it is what it is,” when we don’t know what the exact situation is, when we don’t have an explanation and when we don’t want to put effort into thinking, explaining, reasoning or solving. It would be more honest to say, “I don’t know what it is,” but that invites a criticism.

So we stick with “it is what it is,” a safe, bland evasion of truth, caring, or logic. At its best, it’s sloppy. At its worst, it’s a lie. In either case, it’s time to move away from the saying. It is not flattering to our culture or to the language.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and a writer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

How ‘Affordable’ Is ‘Best’?

There is an article on Yahoo Home page on the 10 best places to live. Having just moved from one major metropolitan place to another, I was curious to know what Yahoo judged the best places.

The towns they picked followed their line of reasoning–low unemployment, art and education offerings, growth, affordability. I was caught off guard by the logic of ‘best’ and house prices. They are comparing prices on a flat scale, in other words, for people moving to any one of these cities from anywhere else in the country.

Of Charlottesville, VA, they say, “Homes are not cheap (median home price $225,000), but the cost of living is manageable.” OK, so I think that $225,000 is not cheap as a median price. Got it.

The next place is Santa Fe, NM, about which they say, not six lines down from calling $225,000 “not cheap,” “Despite its recent growth, Santa Fe remains relatively affordable, with a median home price of $365,000.”

How did we go up $140,000 in median home prices and move from ‘not cheap’ to ‘affordable’? Where is the editor on this story?

It then stumbles on to Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc in California. They choke on the house prices, too, but then they fall into a logic morass. “Indeed, the median home price for the county is $590,000, and your average house in the city itself is over $1.2 million. No matter how appealing, the Santa Barbara area’s cost of living and home prices will prove prohibitive for many Americans.” [Ahem, so what possessed you to chose this place as best ?]

It presses on, “In addition, recent job growth has dipped lately, so it might not be the best place to look for a new job.” This is one of the 10 best cities to live in? One with outrageous house prices and dropping job growth? Here’s how they explain it: “Nevertheless, for those that are retired or financially secure, the Santa Barbara area remains one of unmatched beauty and comfort.” Retired or financially secure? You’d better be retired and have an attic full of money, or you won’t make that mortgage hurdle next month.

In Lompoc, the definition of “best” seems to be “beautiful and comfortable if you are incredibly rich, don’t need a job and can afford a house payment that would buy you a city block in the town you live in now.”

The story marches on. If you recall, the $225,000 Charlottesville home was “not cheap,” but in Asheville, NC, “A low cost of living and affordable housing (median home price $202,100) offset the area’s low measure of diversity and unremarkable economy.” A difference of roughly $23,000 makes the difference between “not cheap” and “affordable.” Again, “best,” doesn’t count the economy. And I’m not sure what “low measure of diversity” means. Does it mean there are no people of color who choose to live in Asheville or are some of the white pointy tops not on the mountains? And no matter what the reason, the writer can’t come up with a better definition for the “best” place to live?

Back to money. If you live in Reno, according to the Yahoo story, “The crime rate is a bit higher than the national average, but the Reno area is affordable (median home price $292,300), which makes it a smart choice for young people. . .” who apparently can’t do math, because $225,000 is “not cheap,” and $292,300 is “affordable,” and so is Santa Fe’s $365,000, despite the $72,700 difference.

My mortgage calculator says that at 6.5% interest and a $10,000 downpayment, there is a difference of $459.51 between those “affordable” houses. About a car payment a month. So if you live in Santa Fe, you can’t make your car payment, but in Reno you can. Except your car will be stolen, since the crime rate beats the national average.

Whoever wrote this must have been one of those children who accidentally got left behind. Not only is it a mathematical mess, it doesn’t add up to “best” on anybody’s sniff test. It’s the 4th of July weekend. The fact checkers and editors must have been on vacation, along with the people who handed in the first draft then headed out the door.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who teeters on despair when she reads sloppy writing. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

–Houses, top to bottom: Charlottesville, VA courtesy www.collegetownlife.com; Oldest house in Santa Fe, NM courtesy picasaweb.google.com; Biltmore house in Asheville, NC courtesy of www.city-data.com; Reno rental property courtesy www.renoretreats.com

Copyright: Orphan Works Act Update

I’ve posted information on the Orphan Works Act before. This time, I am posting something that Art Calendar has because it is complete already. I copied it verbatim from Art Calendar, rather than simply provide a link, so you wouldn’t have to click again. And because I think it’s important.

Here is the article on the Orphan Works Act Update:

UPDATE: As of May 28, creative professionals across the country have joined together to travel to Washington DC June 3, 4 and 5 to share their concerns about the Orphan Works Act with legislators. You can find more information about this and other ways to help at the new Orphan Works Opposition Headquarters site, www.owoh.org .

On April 24, Senators Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Representatives Howard Berman (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI) and Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced legislation (S.2913, HR 5889), which is now being referred to as the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008. It is virtually the same bill that was presented in 2006, and subsequently rejected by Congress. But now, they are trying again.

If passed, the Act would radically alter copyright laws, taking away the automatic copyright now guaranteed to artists of all types who create any type of work. Right now, under U.S. law, you are automatically guaranteed copyright on everything you create, from the sketches in your sketchpad to your best paintings and sculptures. Under the Orphan Works Act, every creator will be required to register everything he or she creates in a private registry system, requiring a fee of course, and supposedly to make it easier for the “public” to search for works and contact the creators if they want to use the works for some purpose. Everything created in the last 30 years will need to be registered through this as-yet nonexistent system, including those works already registered via additional fees with the copyright office. If they aren’t, and some member of the public makes “due diligence” to find the creator of a work and can’t find him or her, that member of the public is entitled to use the work without any limitations, and artists will have no legal recourse. That means every piece of work you have out there, especially online, would be open season for use by major publishing houses and businesses (Microsoft — who owns one of the largest online image databases — and Google have already voiced support for the bill and indicated they will use thousands of images) and everyone in between.

Proponents of the bill say it will assist the public in identifying and contacting creators of works and going through the proper channels to contact them to ask for permission. While we understand the need for an organized system of search, there are MAJOR FLAWS in the proposed bill that need to be addressed before any such proposal should take place. Here are a few points:
∑ Under this law, you would need to register every piece of work you create, including those works that you have already registered with the Copyright Office officially, in some system that does not exist and would likely require you to pay to do so. The time and cost to do this is going to be prohibitive for visual artists.
∑ While this is meant to apply to all types of creative works, including music and literary, visual artists will be impacted the most because of the sheer volume of work we create, making it very expensive to register everything you have ever created or will create.
∑ For the visual arts, there would still be little protection for you and your work, even if it is registered, because search tools would rely on names of artists or titles of work, and not image recognition tools, which are still in their infancy of development.
∑ Under this law, if you register your work, you would have to respond to EVERY inquiry sent to you for use of the work. So in other words, if you have a work out there in a registry system, and some person contacts you and says he wants to use your work for free on his Web site or in his new catalog, you would need to take the time to officially respond to every inquiry within a specified time limit, letting him know if you do not want to have him publish your work for free. This will take a lot of time and effort that we, as professional artists, do not have.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, and yesterday, May 15, the Senate Judiciary Committee did as well. This means the bill will be presented to Congress, likely before the end of May.

We need you to write to your representatives ASAP and let them know that you do NOT want this bill to be expedited, as it is now. Tell them we need a better solution, or tell them you don’t want it at all: Just be sure to tell them something soon. Click the links below to get more information on the bill, including a video that gives you a great overview of the artists’ concerns:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CqBZd0cP5Yc
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00261
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185
http://www.capwiz.com/artsusa/issues/alert/?alertid=11346091&type=CU
http://www.asmp.org/news/spec2008/orphan_update.php
http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/Perlman080313.pdf

Click below for several options of pre-written and editable letters that you can fill out, and that will automatically identify and send it to your representatives when you enter your address:

http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/home/

Write First, Edit Next

You’ve been asked to write an article on a topic that you both know and like. You sit down to write and . . . you stop. It’s not that you don’t know how to write, or even know where to begin, it’s more that you are filled with a feeling of dread. What if you forget something you wanted to say? What if you say too much? What if that first sentence isn’t compelling.

That’s your editor showing up. Your editor is the one who wants to format, replace, cut, polish. The editor has a critical voice and a sharp X-acto knife for a tongue.

The writer part of you wants to get out a lot of information, probably in interesting ways, maybe develop a chart or graph, maybe link to more articles. The writer is dragging in piles of informaton, colored pencils, games, ideas. The editor is frowning at the mess.

How can you be both a writer and editor? The skill sets are quite different, and while I often insist that one person can’t be both, in today’s world, the demand is for exactly those people who are both. How can you handle both?

By separating the fightinig parties and letting each have some time to work. Let the writer come out first. Move away from the linear-structure of the computer and grab a piece of paper. A stack of index cards is better. Write one idea per card and put it in front of you. Don’t edit, don’t stop, don’t wonder where this will fit. Just keep building the stack, one idea at a time. When you run out of ideas, you will have 20 or 30 cards in front of you.

Now feel free to shuffle the cards. Sort them for relevance, for the length of the final article, for sidebars. Shuffle through them to put the most important thing first, along with examples. The final deck should be clean and logical–a story told in pieces on the cards.

The computer is now the ideal tool. Start writing, following the outline you created in a free, non-linear way using your cards. Write all the way through. You editor will show up, but assign the editor the task to go tsk-tsk at the cards you decided not to use this time around. Finish writing.

Now the creative, playful side has had a crack at the article, creating an interesting article with great story-telling and powerful examples. Now it’s time for the editor to come in and tidy up, cut out extra words and stray thoughts, sweep up the mess of wrong punctuation, put in sub-heads with keywords and create a logic thread that runs through the article. If the writer shows up with pictures, colored pencils and games, the editor has the right to ignore the writer or assign a task in another room. Turn-about is fair play.

By being the writer first, then the editor, you can benefit from the right and left sides of the brain, the fun and serious side of writing, the exploration of possibilities, and the linear implementation of logic. And you can do it all without having your head explode. A big benefit to people who must write and edit for a living.

–Image: www.twainquotes.com

—Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Justifying Books

When you take a drubbing on the price of the house you are selling, you have to make compromises. The one we decided on was to save money on the move by doing it ourselves. There are a lot of places that will let you do part of the move yourself. If you let them pack, load, drive, unload, you will may the most. For everything you do, the cost drops.

I’ve sworn I’d no longer move myself, but that was when the house held my equity. Now that it vanished, I’m back to packing our stuff. We are looking into having someone else load it for us.

There is an additional expense to move the cats. It will be August, and too hot to ship them via air. If it’s higher than 95 in the destination city, the airlines won’t take them. And it will be around 120, so that’s out. We have three, so I can’t take them on the airline with me, I could take one, but that leaves two more.

With all these unanswered questions, I’m getting a lot of advice. The one that startled me the most was the suggestion that I get rid of all my books. Yes, I have a lot of them. Some are my husband’s cookbooks, some are the books I have because I am a coach and trainer, and some are reference books for my art–making books and drawing with colored pencils. Those are my references, my answers, my source books. I can’t just get rid of them.

What about those fiction books? I’ve already culled them down. And the rest are my refuge, my big green field to play in, my warm comfort that makes me feel at home. I decorate with books. People who still own hundreds of beanie babies do not get to tell me to get rid of my books “because they just sit there.” I know they need to be dusted, but so do your Gameboys and DVDs. It’s a hard thing to explain–books aren’t an investment, they don’t do anything, but they hold dreams, wisdom, lessons hard learned, laughter, and simple joy. The bring me smiles, tears, heart-pounding fear and the nods of recognized emotion. And yes, when I don’t dust, they bring me sneezes.

I’ll shed old files, clothes, shoes, even my giant stash of beads, all 100 pounds of them. (Write it you are interested, I’m selling them by the pound), but I am keeping the books. They made me who I am, and they make a house a home.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See here work at QuinnCreative.com

Image: vedantam.com

Learning to Write, Teaching Writing

How fast can you learn? Depends on the topic, your interest, and how you learn–reading, doing, practicing. I teach business communication classes–writing largely, with a big dose of giving presentations and how to do a decent PowerPoint presentation. (Hint: Get rid of the bullets and tell a story.)

Most businesses value good writing, and know when their employees need a course. So far, so good. Then things get messy. They want me to teach a dozen or more people how to write . . .in half a day. In a lecture format.

I thought my writing class was ambitious as a two-day class. This is writing. And while it doesn’t include grammar, it does include knowing your audience and goal, how to do a topic brain dump, figuring out how to present the material, writing a good lead, following up with an interesting and useful middle, and writing a conclusion that will lead to action. There are about eight exercises in the class–and exercises mean writing something. If each exercise takes just 20 minutes, just writing the exercises will take two hours and 40 minutes.

If I ask 5 people to read their work and discuss the answers for 5 minutes each, that’s about half an hour for each feedback session, or a total of four hours of feedback for eight exercises. So teaching it in half a day is not in the program. “Take out the exercises,” is always the first suggestion.

But would you want your doctor to have listened to someone lecture on how to perform your surgery, and be doing it for the first time on you? I know what happens when I have the trainee wait-staff or the trainee checker at the grocery store. They are slow and have questions. They should. Trainee writers should have the same opportunity.

Writing is a skill that improves with exercise. In fact, writing often is the only way to become a good writer. Giving participants time to try out a skill, see how it works, ask questions and see/hear others’ writing is the key to a good class. The comment I get most often on the evaluations is, “I wish this were a three-day class.” I have never gotten an evaluation that said, “this class should be shorter, we should have fewer exercises.”

We are a nation in a hurry. A corn plant, from the day it is put into the ground, until the day you pick the ear of corn, takes about 90 days. It will take 90 days if you yell at it, or send it urgent emails, too. Some things can’t be rushed.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and trainer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com Image: pencil on index card. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Codes, Words, and Meaning

When I was six, I began to collect words. Other kids collected Barbie dolls and postcards. I liked words.

The first one was Heiss—hot in German. I liked the sizzling sound at the end. I liked that it was written with the German Ess-Zet, or S/Z, a funny letter that looked like a Greek beta—an upper case B with a long stem. There were a whole string of words that seemed to come in colors—Schadenfreude, the German word for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others, seemed to come dressed in black robes. Misanthrope was an orange hunchback. Filigree had wings.

Words Turn into Codes
In elementary school, my friends and I would design elaborate code alphabets. Not just letter-exchanges, where the letter ‘a ‘would stand for the letter ‘m,’ we invented whole new designs of squares, squiggles and dots. We spent hours designing secret codes just for love notes, angry messages, and news. We designed for those purposes, but quickly grew tired of writing with them. Invention was the fun; writing the tedium. The curse of the inventor: practical applications.

By high school, collecting words wasn’t enough. It grew to include letterforms. Chinese characters, Cyrillic letters, Japanese kanjis all held supreme joy in their discovery.

Codes Develop into Languages
It was inevitable that the collection grew to include made up words. That continued into adulthood. When my son was small, he put a paper towel into his waistband when we sat down to eat. That was a ‘lapkin.’ It made more sense than napkin. The square of cloth you used to take a pan off the stove was a ‘hotholder.’ The sticks you used to propel a boat with were “rows.

Words Come First, then Design
The love of letterforms and words has grown for more than 50 years. My first collages included words as part of the design. Now the words give the design direction and meaning. Words are an important part of my definition of collage as an art medium.

I have long ago conceded that each person who views my collages sees them differently. I feel deeply satisfied when someone says, “These are so wonderful! They speak to me!” Perhaps they do, but in my world, they write to me. And the vocabulary of meaning is in code.

– Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and writer. See her work at quinncreative.com

(c) QuinnCreative. 2008 All rights reserved. Stones carved by Maggie Roe, photograph by Quinn McDonald.