Happy 2011!

I’m back!

I just landed my first assignment to write a personal essay for a big magazine. It’s going to be a triathlon-level challenge in lifting an individual experience to a more universal level that people who are not me will find interesting and maybe even inspiring.

Yes, I’m a little intimidated. My original plan for this very blog — to track my progress in confronting my fears — sort of fell apart as I discovered, first, that I didn’t have nearly as many fears as I originally thought, and second, that I was falling into the whole “the wonder of me” trap in which I expected total strangers to care about my life without making the effort to make said life something they could relate to. I was so worried about seeming self-involved and self-indulgent that I self-censored myself right out of blogging. And so here I am again, after a month of silence, starting from scratch.

I have no idea what that means. I think it means I’m going to write about whatever I want, as long as it has some vague connection to the idea of having a bigger, better, more satisfying life. I know it means trying to find some way to make this less an echo chamber and more a conversation with other people who want a big heaping helping of More, whatever More is.

I don’t want this to be a chore. I want it to be a self-indulgence, like going to the movies alone, or taking a hot bath with a cold beer, or finally treating myself to the luggage of my dreams. (My Aeronaut arrives tomorrow!) I’m making it up as I go. Isn’t that the point — to explore, express, expand? I think so.

Stay tuned.

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On small beautiful things

I’m supposed to be writing a crappy novel right now for National Novel Writing Month. I started it last night while sitting in my local coffee shop with half a dozen other NaNos, and so far, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to finish. I need to do 1,667 words a day to hit the 50,000-word mark by the end of the month; last night I only managed to eke out 900 or so, and about 450 of them suck.

In my defense, I was a little distracted by the ball game. Which is what I really want to write about right now. The ball game. The beautiful, beautiful ball game in which the San Francisco Giants beat the ever-lovin’ pants off the Texas Rangers, who seemed to have forgotten how to swing a bat. There’s something incredibly inspiring about witnessing a collection of scrappy youngsters and workmanlike tradesmen who were never supposed to make it to the post-season transform before my eyes into a team of superstars. I mean, Buster Posey! He’s a rookie! He’s barely old enough to shave! But now, no matter what happens, for the rest of his life, that kid is a World Series champion catcher!

In the grand scheme of things, I know, this is pretty meaningless. As people who don’t care about baseball keep reminding me, it’s just a game. So why do I care? For the same reason that I’m writing a crappy novel for the hell of it: because things don’t have to be significant or even remotely important to have meaning and value. I’m participating in NaNoWriMo because I’ve never tried to write fiction before and I think I might enjoy it — even though I may yet find myself tearing out my hair over it, one strand at a time. I’m loving the World Series buzz because for just a little while, this entire city is surfing a giant black and orange wave of communal bliss — even though today is an election and tomorrow morning we’ll be sniping at each other over the results. It’s the little things.

Speaking of little things, here is a lovely hypnotic video of a letterpress in action, printing business cards. Enjoy!

Keegan Meegan Press & Bindery from :::MAGNETIC ARCHIVES:: on Vimeo.

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Freelanciversary

It was 20 years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…no, wait, that’s not right.

*sound of backwards tape loop*

It was 20 years ago today that the Holyoke (MA) Transcript-Telegram laid off half its newsroom, including me. It was my second post-college job; I was all of 23.

I celebrate what I call my “freelanciversary” today because I started beating the bushes for freelance work within hours of losing my job, and in fact landed a couple of assignments within a week or two. I didn’t truly commit myself to self-employment until the following spring, when I turned down an offer from a newspaper in semi-rural Pennsylvania. In the depths of a recession it was the only offer I’d gotten in nine months, but I knew if I moved there, this city girl would be stuck in the sticks, possibly permanently, so I said no. And that, as they say, was that. I’ve neither had nor looked for a “real” job since.

I’m going to be honest: I was a shitty employee when I was one. I wasn’t good at prioritizing the paper’s needs — in fact, I’m pretty sure I was first on the layoff list not just because I was the last hired, but because the previous month, I had refused my editor’s request to cancel my vacation on two days’ notice. He wanted me to stick around to cover what I vaguely remember was a predicted severe storm system. I was young, stubborn, and too poor to eat what I’d already spent on a non-refundable airfare. In retrospect, it was probably a test. Did I fail? Well, yes, in the sense that I lost my job three weeks later.

In the larger sense, though, I think I passed the test with flying colors. In 1993, the T-T laid off everyone else, too, and joined the long list of defunct newspapers. By then, I had moved back to the Boston area, was writing weekly features for the Boston Herald’s careers section, and had earned my first national byline with a piece in Cosmopolitan. Money was excruciatingly tight — I was sharing a three-bedroom in Somerville, filling in the gaps between assignments by temping as a legal secretary, and eating a lot of rice and beans — but I no longer had to work long hours, navigate confusing office politics, or, some days, get dressed at all.

A lot has changed in 20 years. The Internet has come along to make some things easier (I do not miss the days of snail-mailing printed-out manuscripts a week before deadline to make sure they arrived on time, nor — much as I love libraries — do I miss hours of fruitless research there), but it’s also deeply fucked up the publishing industry as a whole. Writing for consumer publications is less glamorous and more grinding than it used to be; as my friend Mary Beth tweeted just this morning, “Recently rejected prestige assignment for no pay & lucrative one from mag that treats writers like shit.” On the other hand, while I never imagined I’d spend about half my time writing web content, case studies, and other marketing communications for high tech companies, my bank account finds it very satisfying — and I can actually understand what my techie friends are talking about. I’ve written a book for which I still get the occasional thank you email eight years later. I still get paid to do fun stuff now and then, like talking to pizza-obsessed entrepreneurs and learning to make chocolate truffles. And I still don’t have to get dressed if I don’t want to. (You’ve heard of Casual Friday? I like to have Pantsless Wednesday.) All in all, I love my job. And how many people do you know who can say that?

So here’s to you, editor who now seems to be working for a newspaper on Cape Cod. Thanks for canning my ass 20 years ago this afternoon. It didn’t seem like it at the time, but it was actually the greatest thing anyone’s ever done for me.

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Sherd you? Why not!

On an archaeological dig, everything is a feature or a context (and sometimes both). A dark spot that might be a filled-in pit is a feature. The stuff that you dig out of it is a context. Anything from a context gets recorded as coming from that context. So if something gets dug up, kicked “out of context,” and trampled down elsewhere, or bulldozed out of the way to get down to the next layer of archaeology, or whatever, it’s basically trash — it no longer has any archaeological value, because you can’t relate it to anything else. On the dig I volunteered on, anything that was out of context ended up on the big mound of dirt which will eventually be used to backfill the site once the excavation is over and construction starts. So we were allowed to sort of kick at the dirt to see what we could find.

Over the week, I plucked out three small souvenirs. One was a thick chunk of iridescent glass which one of the archaeologists immediately identified as the bottom of a beer bottle from the brewery that was on the site in the 1800s. It makes a very nice paperweight. Another was a fingertip-sized bit of blue and white ceramic that was obviously part of a dinner plate (probably also Victorian), which I think I’d like to set into silver to wear as a pendant. The third was a piece of fired red clay pottery with a bit of greenish brown glaze at the edge. I snagged that on my final day on the dig and didn’t have a chance to show it to anyone there, so I had no clue what it was. I figured since my other two souvenirs were Victorian, this one probably was, too. Maybe a bit of a clay roof tile or something.

Before I left York, though, I visited the Yorkshire Museum and ended up chatting with one of the employees, a nice young guy named Barry who, as it turned out, happened to be an archaeologist specializing in old pottery. When I told him about my mystery object (which was already packed away in my luggage), he gave me his card and told me that if I sent him photos of it, he’d try to identify it for me. So I did.

And lo, this afternoon, I got this very exciting email from him:

What you have there looks like a sherd of locally made Post Medieval Red Coarseware, with a crude splash glaze decoration. Roughly 1450 to 1600s, it was a ‘functional’ type of pottery, similar to Humberware, made at a time when metal vessels had become fashionable and pottery cheap.

Unfortunately it’s hard to tell what it would be part of without part of the rim, base, or handle (and it’s hard to judge the curvature from a photo), but in the absence of any distinguishing features, it’s most likely from a jug.

So I now have a roughly 500-year-old bit of broken pottery sitting on my mantelpiece. How cool is that?

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Making things up

I came home from vacation with an idea for a mystery novel.

Yes, I fear I’m going to commit fiction.

You might ask why someone who writes for a living feels fear at the prospect of writing something. Simple: part of me thinks if I’m going to spend my precious time on writing, it should be guaranteed to produce income. I can noodle around with some other hobby that won’t suck away the writing energy I need to make a living.

And let’s face it: I’m a nonfiction writer. I studied journalism; I worked as a reporter; I write about true things. All the pieces are there, I just have to put them together in a way that’s both logical and attractive. When I think about writing fiction, my first reaction is, “What do you mean, I have to make things up?”

Of course, I have friends who are novelists, and their reaction to the idea of writing nonfiction is basically, “What do you mean, I can’t just make things up?” So clearly, the part of the brain that writes fiction is not attached to the part of the brain that writes nonfiction, other than some overlap in the actual language-producing regions. And maybe, if it’s a different part of the brain, the act of writing fiction won’t diminish the energy and motivation I need to write the things that pay my bills. Maybe I can think of it as creative play, the way I think of photography or cooking, two other things I do with no expectation they’ll lead to anything but enjoyment.

I also have a hard time with quitting. I have “winners never quit and quitters never win” burned into my synapses. I feel like I have to push my way through things until I’m good at them or they’re done, whichever comes first — even if doing so makes me completely fucking miserable. So maybe it would be a salutary experience to try something, just for the hell of it, and give myself permission to quit if I realize I’m not enjoying it.

Because I have this vivid image of a woman in a tattoo artist’s chair. She’s having a small but intricately detailed skull inked onto her left shoulder. She’s explaining to the tattoo artist that a girl needs something by which to remember her first skeleton. And I need to know what happens next.

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