NW 23rd Ave Interview with Tatiana Miletta

Check out my new interview with the beautiful Tati Miletta: newlywed, aspiring photographer, and long-time hostess of Papa Haydn on NW 23rd and Irving here.

Find out why Tati is so beloved by the NW 23rd Ave community and all that know her!

Watch for more interviews every Monday at:

www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com

Thinking Backwards

I love discovering the ways in which different creative media influence one another.  Among other greats of the fashion and art world that Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen interview in their book Influence, Mary-Kate talks to interior architect and designer David Collins.  He tells her that he is inspired by Gone with the Wind because of the way it was written.  Margaret Mitchell wrote her manuscript beginning with the final chapters and worked her way through the story backwards.  In fact, the manuscript was accepted for publication before she had even completed the first chapters (Blair Rouse).  Collins explains how this style of writing has influenced his work:

You have to know the ending; how you got there is the story--because there are so many things that are a series of accidental happenings.  That's why, when I'm approaching a design project, I've got to figure out what it's going to feel like in the end.  I need to think about the ending first.  You don't always know what it's going to look like totally, but you have to think of what its going to feel like at the end.

I think this is often true in writing.  Not that you always need to or even can know the ending, but that it often helps to know what it is that you are trying to accomplish.  The mood, the tone, the style; what you want it to feel like at the end; the effect you want it to have for you and for the reader.  For me, the first draft usually doesn't come out feeling like I want it to, so I have to reread, rewrite, revise and sculpt it into something that serves the purpose that I meant for it to serve.  This is what people in the writing world call the "felt sense," among other names. It is what you keep coming back to when you get stopped, or when you just need to make sure you're staying on track.  Without it, writing can go everywhere and be anything; with it, writing can be effective, focused and meaningful.

If You've Ever Try to Spell it "Fluxuate"...

First, you would have been wrong.  It is spelled "fluctuate."

With that out of the way, here is what might have happened if you've ever been thrown off by this seemingly common misspelling:

You might first have tried to type "fluxuate" into your word processing program, only to discover that it is spelled wrong.

With no help from the spell check suggestions, you might then have typed "fluxuate" into your google search bar with the hopes of being saved by the ever-helpful "did you mean..." correction function.

Instead, you might have discovered, high on your list of search results, a blog by the name of Spooks By Me.  Specifically, a post from February 27, 2007 titled "Today, I tried to spell fluctuate as "fluxuate." 

The post itself has nothing to do with the word or the spelling of the word fluctuate, but it seems to have become a bit of a phenomenon.  The post has a whopping 178 comments, including comments from within the past few weeks (for those of you who aren't paying attention, that's over three years later)!

The surge of comments has sparked a debate over whether all these people should have gone the dictionary route rather than typing their questions into google (I vote google... c'mon, how are you supposed to use a dictionary to efficiently find the correct spelling of a word spelled f-l-u-c... if you think that it begins f-l-u-x...? Seriously.), but it has also become a useful resource with many of the comments including the correct spelling!

I don't really know what all of this means, other than that an apparently common misspelling obviously isn't getting a lot of attention if this is first thing that comes up in google.  But if you are as amused by it as I am, you can check it out for yourself here.

NW 23rd Ave Person of the Week Interview

The first NW 23rd Person of the Week Interview is up!  Check out my interview with Nick Dothee here.

Thanks again to Nick for sitting down with me and giving me so much great material to work with. Thanks to Dave and the NW 23rd Ave Blog for letting me help out with your quest to spread the word about all NW 23rd has to offer.  

Interviews will post on Mondays weekly beginning June 28th. Watch out for them at www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com

A Different Way of Writing

I was recently asked to write for a local blog that shares news and information about the NW 23rd Ave shopping district in Portland.  I was given full reign to contribute to the blog in any way that I desired, so I decided to use the opportunity to try out interviews.  It is a completely new form of writing for me but one that I have been wanting to take a shot at for a while.  So far, it has definitely been a learning experience. The questions are the easy part - just think up some basic questions, silly questions, questions about the interviewee's impressions of and experiences on NW 23rd - but introducing the person is different.  How do you accurately represent someone's story in your own words in only a few sentences?  How do you do justice to all the interesting things about them without going over the top?

My guide has been an excerpt from Ken Macrorie's Telling Writing.  Macrorie's mantra: 

"All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth."

Good writing is honest and authentic, doesn't waste words and shares with the reader the experiences of the writer.  My first interviewee put my ability to write this way to the test.

I chose to interview Nick in part because I see him regularly and could set up the interview quickly and easily; but also because he is a musician, so I knew he would have something to share and would be comfortable sitting down and talking with me.  Nick has a great personality so my expectations were high but he managed to exceed them.  Before he answered a few written questions I asked him to tell me a little bit about himself, his past, and his recent move to Portland.  He was incredibly enthusiastic and genuine about his story and I felt like I had to find a way to convey the experience that I had talking to him to the readers of the blog.  What came to mind, however, were cliches, not the truth.

To find the truth, Macrorie suggest writing continuously for ten minutes without stopping.  I think the point is that when you can't stop to think about what you're writing your mind can't come up with the cliches and the "great thoughts" that you might otherwise resort to.  Without the time to think, you don't have anything to draw from but the truth.  So I sat down and I started writing about Nick.

It worked, it didn't even take ten minutes of continuous writing before real, honest statements about what I had learned began to flow.  I began to discover what was really important about my interview with Nick and what it was that impressed me about him.  I really only had a few lines to write, but I think that I was able to express what was important to him and to me.

Thanks to Nick for being my guinea pig!  Check out the NW 23rd Ave Blog at www.nw23rdav.wordpress.com and I'll be sure to share the interview when it posts.

Punctuation Station

 A happy amendment to the Grammar With a Sense of Humor post!

Please enjoy The Oatmeal's new addition:

How to Use a Semicolon

Pleasure Reading

I wanted to share two great websites that I have recently had the pleasure of discovering.

"Personal, Political, Provocative"

The Sun Magazine features many pieces from their monthly publication online.  The Sun is a non-profit, advertisement-free magazine that features photographs, poetry, interviews, short stories and essays submitted by regular contributors and readers.  The subject matter is life, and The Sun looks for honest, personal and political writing that reveals some of its complexities.  The result is a fascinating rainy day read.

Find out more about The Sun and read select pieces at www.thesunmagazine.org

"You are traveling with us today, no?"

Border Hopping is an online collection of worldly goodies including visual art, photography, reviews and writing.  The theme is entirely cultural with the goal of giving readers a diverse experience of world travel from the comfort of their desk chairs.  The writing consists of all genres including stories, poetry and journalesque pieces.  Like The Sun, Border Hopping welcomes reader submissions.

Check out Border Hopping at  www.borderhopping.net

Grammar With a Sense of Humor

I use "grammar" here in the general sense, as the particular articles that I list here from The Oatmeal actually comment specifically on spelling and punctuation. However, I'll use this opportunity to include some other online resources for all forms of grammar.

Please enjoy these two entries from The Oatmeal. While hilarious, I think that they actually deliver some really great ways of remembering these rules. It's harder to forget absurdity, isn't it?

Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling
How to Use an Apostrophe


Here are a few more resources on grammar:
Grammar Girl
Grammar Bytes
Blue Pencil Editing Blog
The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation

A Look at Perception

In the study of literature and the conversation about how it is interpreted, there is always the question of the reader's context. How a person reads a text is effected by her experiences, her viewpoint, her beliefs, even her immediate moods and emotions at the time of reading.

Visual and performance artist Amir Baradaran explores this subject in an absolutely fascinating way.

As if Marina Abramović's current exhibit/performance, The Artist is Present at MoMA weren't fascinating enough, Baradaran brought a performance of his own into the exhibit a few days after its opening. His performance, titled The Other Artist is Present highlights the perception of the audience by altering their experience. From the explanation of the piece on Baradaran's website:

"No doubt, certain patrons will recall the mysterious man upon entering the atrium and witnessing Abramovic’s piece, thus shaping their experience of what was once an unrelated work. By joining itself to the Balkan artist’s performance, Baradaran’s reactive piece has left an indelible mark- impacting and altering the perception and memories of the viewer."

View Amir Baradaran's four act performance The Other Artist is Present

More about about Marina Abramović and The Artist is Present:
Wikipedia
New York Times
The Artist is Present at MoMA
The Marina Film Project

Writing is Hard

Most of us would agree that writing is not easy. Someone was recently talking about the "struggle" of writing. I often use the word "agony." You have to find the best words to say what you mean; you have to make it interesting; you have to keep it organized; it has to make sense; you have to figure out how to transition to the next paragraph; you have to worry about whether your readers will get it; and so on...

Take this as a good sign.

One definition of a professional writer (a definition which much of their own testimony implies) might be this: one who finds ways to write in spite of, not without, the discomfort of writing.
- James Seitz

Experts on writing say over and over that a sure sign of an immature writer is one to whom writing comes easily. Immature writers write what comes to mind, assume that it's the best they can do, and are satisfied. Mature writers know that writing is hard, that they must struggle through it, even agonize over it, and that they may still never be fully happy with a final product.

Of course, this struggle is part of what makes great writing so great, and it is part of what does make writing so satisfying. To have worked through it, to have come up with something that you feel is worth something, or to have discovered something that you didn't know you had to say makes it all worth it.