This was one of the first songs I learned the words to. I remember sitting on the floor around an upright piano with the other kids with folded legs. Ms. Bachus, our kindergarten teacher, looked over her shoulder at us us and raised her eyebrows – an encouragement to sing along. Her hands were arched and they lifted and dropped on the chords sounding rich and wooden in the piano’s belly. Kindergarten teachers were magic then in how they taught and entertained us, too, with real vaudeville talent. I was a nervous little boy so scared to go to school some days that I’d worry myself sick. I missed a full week that winter with a pretend illness that came about with no fever and no recognizable side-effects. Rehearsing this song for the winter music concert made me feel happy. It filled me with so much joy that I wondered if anyone could see it inside me.
Every divorced mother in the 80s piloted a white Chevy Citation hatch-back. They were affordable and family-friendly, with plenty of space, and most importantly, they weren’t station wagons. I rode in one with my mother almost always in the back seat so I could carry out battles between my action figures or lie on my back and watch the clouds. My parents were divorced in 1984, and for a time, I was worried that the judge might make me choose between living with my mother and father. I was afraid of what my dad would do about my choice. I can remember a dozen songs from that time, but this one is the most vivid. The mix reminds me of the way my little boy smiles while he cries when something upsets him, but he doesn’t understand why. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Music
Exercising a haughty vocabulary – particularly in a sales piece – can be a risky move for a copywriter. I don’t know about you, but if I was writing promotional copy for a book touting effective communication with employees, I don’t think I’d use the word “panoply” in the opening sentence. PR News dropped me a line with an e-cycle today that utilized this hook. I’ve pasted the opening paragraph below. Notice the semicolon and yet another vocabulary stretch, “foolhardy”. The person who wrote this is trying to tell readers something – and I think it’s that they are more intelligent than us. Or maybe that know how to use a thesaurus. But that does that make you want to purchase the book?
“In PR News’ inaugural Employee Communications Guidebook, we offer a full panoply of information that can improve your skills for many scenarios. Whether it’s recruiting and retaining talent or greening the workplace, this Guidebook will hone your understanding on how you can craft and ensure effective messaging to employees; it will also give you the resources you need to streamline all channels of internal communications. Putting employee communications on the backburner during this challenging period is not only foolhardy but a serious misstep that can have damaging repercussions from which your company, agency or association may never fully recover.”
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Tags: Business
My first real writing gig was as a reporter for a driveway-weekly newspaper. You know the kind. The kind that nobody picks up to read, that bake in the sun until they are stacked like kindling and threatening to catch flame. No one read the newspaper I worked for so no one knew the name of it or who to call to hold delivery if they took a trip with the kids to Disney World. In the summer, every other driveway in the suburban delivery zone would pile up with them because no one was there to feel the shame from being too lazy to toss them. The glory in writing for that paper wasn’t in the byline and certainly not in the paycheck. What should have sweetened the deal was that I had my own office, even if it was a storage closet with no view onto the quaint rivertown streets. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Journalism
During a typical workday, it’s hard to say how many words I write. For the page, it can be anywhere from zero (depending on my meeting schedule) to 2,000 or so. I have no idea where that number would stand if e-mail were factored into the final tally. I’m not sure I’d want to know. In the last 11 years as a professional writer, I’ve developed my own processes and theories to abide by in this trade, but in preparing for a recent presentation on writing instruction, I came across George Orwell’s rules for effective writing. I wasn’t aware that he’d shared his theories so plainly. I also wasn’t familiar with the exchange between Faulkner and Hemingway described in this article about Orwell’s approach. My thoughts on Hemingway have been mostly middling, but this story is literary gold.
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Tags: Thoughts on Writing
Back roads through the Kansas foothills wound us first past the Leavenworth military cemetery and then Lansing Prison, by hills raked with white headstones and haunted with barbed-wire shadows. The narrow streets were overhung with branches, bare, about to bud, and the sunshine covered the hills like a sheet kicked up and spread out on the flowing hills that rose and fell like dinosaur humps. By then, she’d gotten tired in the backseat and had given up on the scenery. She closed her eyes in trust and felt the climbs and the drops as her father drove on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Kids
