Sharing

29 December 2009 | Comments Off

Saw your Write-o-Rama post. Great talking to you and fun class. Thought I’d share the results of our class exercise.

Thank you for sharing!

I really enjoyed the class, and I like what you wrote, especially how you’ve captured the way that people break off in the middle of important moments to eat bread or pour beer; and the way we use these things sometimes to gather our thoughts, or to express them.

And as I told you that day, I very much enjoy Heidi, Geek Girl Detective!

Thanks for helping make my day at Hugo House a lot of fun.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, writing 

Liberation

25 October 2009 | Comments Off

Via “Want to talk?” on October 17.

Hi Kelley,

I did not know your birthday until this moment. September 21 was just a few days earlier. My warm thought goes your way for a happy 49 – I was there almost 100 years ago or so it seems. But It gets better when you actually reach the milestone 50 – suddenly everything falls in place, one understands the riddle of life (i.e., why certain things work and others don’t) and one is liberated (just like Spinoza says,”… the more the mind knows, the better it understands the natural forces. And the more it understands life, the easier it is to get rid of useless things..”)!

Enjoy this and the coming years. I will be sure to remember your birthday next year. You are sweet, warm, and wonderful. My best.

Amit

Thanks for your good thoughts on the common cure for the seasonal cold. But this year it seemed to last forever. Anyhow, I am on the mend now, I will regain my full strength in about 37.74 more hours.

Hello, Amit, and thank you for the warm wishes.

All my decades have been interesting and full of growth, and so far I find that I enjoy myself and other people and life in general more as I get older. My 40’s have certainly been a wild ride… but more than that too. I’ve come to a deeper sense of myself and my place in the world. And I am trying to learn (again!) the best balance for me between doing and being. I feel as though there is progress there.

And so I hope that my 50’s will keep me on this path. It would be lovely to understand everything and feel liberated from the false constraints! It’s interesting to understand more and more on a gut level (not just an intellectual level) how many of those constraints are only there because I allow it.

Nicola said to me the other day that the 50’s are the decade when women become invisible, before emerging again in their later decades as streamlined, focused, clearly themselves (I am paraphrasing now, but that’s how I heard it). I don’t know if this is true, but I am certainly feeling resistant to it. I don’t want to be invisible. I’m finally seeing myself; I want other people to see me too.

I guess I’ll find out. Perhaps part of the liberation is that such things no longer apply to us unless we apply them to ourselves. Perhaps I will find they are some of Spinoza’s useless things that I may get rid of. I hope so.

I’m glad you are feeling better.

Best,

Kelley

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me 

100 days of photos

2 May 2009 | 2 Comments

Photo by Callie Shell

photo by Callie Shell

Last October, I talked about a photo essay by Callie Shell that I really enjoyed, chronicling the Obama campaign. Well, she’s done it again. TIME magazine has just published Shell’s series of photos of President Obama’s first 100 days in office.

Here’s the thing: these are good photos, but they are not telling a hugely emotional story. They show the President and his people mostly at work, occasionally at rest. And yet, looking through them made me cry. Good cry or bad cry? Nicola asked when I told her. This was good cry, definitely.

I spent eight years believing to my core that there was not a single human being in the White House who was interested in understanding who I am and what I might need (not even as a citizen, never mind as one human being to another). I felt completely invisible to my government, except in all the let-me-monitor-your-email ways. And that was fine: I didn’t want to come to the attention of those folks, because no good ever came of that for most of us.

But I look at these photos, and I don’t feel that way now. I feel like smart people are working long hours to do their best for me. For me. I feel like it would be a pleasure and a privilege to sit with these people at dinner and talk about life, love, art, science, history, the beauty of the world and the people in it. I just like them, you know?

And I think this makes me cry because I had given up hope of ever feeling this way about government of any kind, ever again. The City of Seattle and the State of Washington take pretty good care of me; but suddenly, unexpectedly, I feel closer to these strangers in D.C. than I do to people running things in my own back yard. And it feels good.

(If you’re interested in an overview of the key events of the first 100 days, TIME also offers this very cool interactive guide.)

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me 

City Life

8 December 2008 | 5 Comments

I’ve been dancing with your spam filter for some unknown reason…hopefully, this will go through, and hopefully you haven’t been copied this five times over. : D

Yours are among my few most beloved, formative books and stories, inspiring in my writing and my life. My experience of Solitaire’s climaxes is imprinted thoroughly in my mind, and I am so grateful for it.

Is “The Hum of Human Cities” available outside of (the scarce, grr-expensive) Pulphouse 9 / are you planning to republish it? I thought it best to ask you, conveniently giving me an excuse to attack you with fan-mail. : )

Adrian

Hello, Adrian, and thank you for being stubborn with the form. You’re not the first person to have trouble. I have to get a different plug-in. In the meantime, if anyone wants to start a conversation here and has trouble with the form, please feel free to email me at contact at kelleyeskridge dot com (although I don’t know why I bother to stretch the address, the spammers-boils-be-upon-them found me long ago). Please say that you are submitting a “Talk To Me” post if you use email.

Thank you so much for these kind words, I’m honored. It is always my hope as a writer to touch other human beings in some way with my work, to make a connection… it means a lot to me when someone takes the time to tell me that has happened.

“The Hum of Human Cities” is indeed available in my recent collection Dangerous Space, under its original title “City Life.” It was my first sale (wow, what a feeling that was…). Kris Rusch, the editor of Pulphouse (bows in Kris’ direction in gratitude), didn’t like the title. So I found “Hum,” and like it well enough, but I’ve never stopped thinking of the story as “City Life.” I can be pretty stubborn myself sometimes (grin). So I returned to that title for the collection.

I don’t know if you’ve read all my stories: if not, there are three free here on the site: “Strings”, “And Salome Danced“, and “Dangerous Space“.

Fan mail is never an attack. Come back anytime.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, writing 

Buster, life coach

6 December 2008 | 1 Comment

I flounced over from a link on Booksquare. Had to comment on the cat — with four of my own acting as miscellaneous muses, masters and subjects of devious deeds in fiction and fact — I relate to Buster.

Cheers,

Pat Harrington
http://patriciaharrington.com

Isn’t Buster awesome? Let’s not even bother with a link, let’s just present him again in all his glory:

I discovered Buster when I was first putting together the project management team at Wizards of the Coast. I’d been facilitating for years (I’ve led meetings from 2 people to 250 people), and I was very glad I had those skills. I wasn’t expecting all the negotiating I had to do with other executives, my own team, and other teams that we worked with.

The thing is, all the facilitation skills in the world don’t stop other people from being defensive, uncommunicative, frightened or angered by change, or from hijacking the conversation onto another track. They just give me more tools with which to respond. And so sometimes I felt overwhelmed or stressed. And then I would return to my desk, look at Buster, nod in silent acknowledgment of our common impulse, and then go back out and start trying to hammer out more agreements.

Buster reminds me that good managers don’t eat the mice. And even though I’m not a direct manager in a corporate job right now, the fact is that we all “manage” relationships with each other every day, in large and small ways. So please don’t eat the mice.

Thanks, Pat, for bringing Buster back to the conversation today.

And a note: the Booksquare link Pat is referring to was a Twitter tweet… Yep, I’m on Twitter now. So is Nicola. Come join us in the twitterverse anytime.

And another note: I’m now moved to cross-post a version of this to Humans At Work. Come on over and have a look — there’s also a post about diversity that features a rockin’ Evanescence video, and a look at a recent interview about trust and social connection in every aspect of our lives — family, work, and community. If you enjoy the conversations here, please join me for more at Humans At Work.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, life, talk to me 

Shooing the plot

2 December 2008 | 4 Comments

Just wanted to say I enjoyed reading Solitaire. It kept me entertained with an intriguing plotline that led to a satisfying ending. The writing style really drew me into the story. I appreciate a book that gives elaborate yet consistent descriptions of its imaginary locales, and Solitaire delivered beautifully with its portrayals of Ko Island and NNA Zone 17.

I especially liked the subtle humor sprinkled throughout the novel. I got a kick out of the map-dispensing pillar that mixed courtesy with dire warnings about failure to recycle. The rejection e-mail from the art gallery was a scream. My favorite character (after Frankenbear of course) was Crichton. She really had a way with words (“He’s not talking to me”).

I winced at this depiction of the Garbo team: “All of them except the designer were typical R&D types — blindingly smart, highly verbal, suspicious of non-technical language, critical of new ideas, desperate for credit, and terminally rude.” Ouch! Does that describe the R&D staff at Wizards of the Coast?

Just a few criticisms. First, the basic premise was really hard to believe: that a world government would choose its future leaders based on the second they were born. Civilizations have been known to choose their chiefs in some pretty bizarre ways, but that way takes the prize for sheer irrelevance and lack of enforceability. Perhaps some further background on the history of EarthGov’s formation would help.

Why is Ko Island so cold in the winter that people put on a hundred layers of clothes and drink hot soup all the time? It’s close to Hong Kong, so it should have the same subtropical climate.

I didn’t quite understand Tiger’s behavior on Halloween and afterward. Presumably he knew about Jackal and Snow, and he was their web mate, so his actions seemed rather odd. Maybe a little more development of Tiger’s character would help.

The events at Mirabile really strained credibility, even allowing for the numerous coincidences involved. Why would the elevator control console have a “disengage backup system” command that instantly lets all three elevators drop? Backup brakes for an elevator ought to remain engaged until manually disengaged. Why did the second attendant leave the room? What eventually happened to the two attendants? “One … had been found dead; the other, not at all.” Did Ko executives have them iced or something?

Despite these issues, I enjoyed the book a lot. I look forward to your next novel. In the meantime, maybe I’ll check out some of Nicola’s writings. Do you have a favorite work of hers that you’d recommend?

Steve

Hi, Steve, and I apologize about 400 times, one for every day your email went unread (aside to the rest of the internet — yep, Steve’s message found its way into a corner of my computer and I only just discovered it a couple weeks ago. And we went to high school together, so it’s not like I’m just any old rude person, I’m a rude person he actually knows. Color me embarrassed.)

I’m glad you liked Solitaire overall, although I do get a chuckle from the idea that the plotline works at any point. Plot is not my strength; really I just want to wave my hands at it in a particular cliched Southern girl fashion, as if shooing it off into a corner. But I have learned that readers expect it.

Endings, however, are important to me, and I’ve certainly gotten enough grief from people about the “neatly wrapped up ending” that it’s nice to have someone find it satisfying. It satisfies me too, but I’ve never thought of it as neatly wrapped up. Mostly, I think of it as one part of Jackal’s life being irrevocably over… and that’s bittersweet for me, and (I’ve always imagined) for her as well.

And thank you for loving Crichton. I just adore her — all those years of being in and out of her head when I was wrestling with the novel, and when I read Solitaire she still makes me laugh out loud. I’d love to have her as a friend, not just for her charm — it would get old if that was all there was to her — but for her vast intelligence and her absolutely realistic take on things. I think she’s the smartest person in the book, except for maybe Neill. Or maybe it’s just that Crichton doesn’t quite have his experience yet, and one day she will give him a run for his money.

Hah. If there were ever going to be a “sequel” to Solitaire, maybe that would have to be it.

So, you are the first person in all these years who has asked me directly if that sentence about R&D was based on my experience at Wizards. Why, yes, it was, and is as precise a description as I could create of the folks I knew there (I didn’t know them all, so the rest may have been as sweet as pie). The exception was always Richard, the original designer of Magic, who was very nice to deal with, and was so smart that he never had to prove a thing to anyone.

I don’t blame you for arguing with the Hopes premise (shoo, plot, shoo!), although perhaps it wasn’t clear that the Hope was an honorary/PR designation — none of them were growing up to be the presidents of their nations. Jackal was being groomed for behind-the-scenes work in EarthGov, an actual position of power and influence, but still not leadership. The primary purposes of the Hopes was to take up highly visible “feel good” roles on the world stage, to be someone that a citizen of a participating nation could point to as a role model. As the Hopes are successful, so EarthGov takes on a certain credibility and “success” by association. It’s essentially celebrity politics turned about 30 degrees on its head. As carefree as I may be with plot sometimes, even I would not see the actual leaders of the near future world chosen quite so randomly.

The climate of Hong Kong: you’re right, of course, but they do have outlier days in the winter months where temperatures can get down into the 40’s or even 30’s. This may not seem particularly arduous to you, but I gave Jackal my response to cold — and I grew up in Florida, fer gosh sakes. There’s always a few days in Florida where the temperature gets into the 30’s or 40’s, and when I was growing up, whap, the mercury hit the magic number of 49 or below and women would pull out their fur coats and wear them to the gas station, the grocery store, wherever they could, just to get some use out of them.

As you may imagine, the weather at St. Paul’s was a revelation to me. I was cold all the time there.

As for Tiger, we can agree that mileage varies. I don’t need him to be reasonable or rational: young people in love so rarely are, in my experience.

You’re right about the elevator mechanics in Mirabile, that’s an example of me scratching my head and trying to plot. I needed a way for Jackal to directly interact with the crash — a way for her to have some responsibility for what happened. That’s the best I could come up with at the time. One of my writing teachers used to say that the best thing a writer can do when she finds herself on thin ice is move fast and point in the other direction (grin).

If you’re interested, there’s a very long and thoughtful conversation in the comments here about both Tiger and the intersection of accident and responsibility in the Mirabile scene.

As for Nicola’s books, well, read them all (another grin). Try Slow River — it’s an elegant book in both structure and in sheer writing, and there’s a reason it won the Nebula (beams with pride at Nicola through the internet).

Steve, thanks so much for hanging in there! And thanks for the thoughtful response to Solitaire.

Enjoy your day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, writing 

Shirley Jackson

25 November 2008 | 3 Comments

I just read the post from Venetian Vampire in response to your blog on Oct. 20 about Shirley Jackson. I have always been drawn to her writing and wonder if you care to comment further about her. Thanks either way.

I think Jackson is a wonderful writer. I admire greatly her spareness of language, and the simplicity with which she describes complex, fragile moments between human beings. And she wrote some very shocking things for a mainstream middle-class white woman of her time — “The Lottery” was an absolute scandal, go read the Wikipedia article about it.

I think The Haunting of Hill House is a masterpiece, and I also like We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although that book seems to be more of a particular taste (sort of like artichokes or anchovies, I suppose). It fascinates and delights me that she wrote stories that were so unabashedly strange and frightening and shocking without having to get all bohemian about it. She lived an apparently satisfying life with her husband and kids and all the responsibilities of a 1940’s/50’s wife and mother, and then she went into her room and wrote Hill House… I would love to have had dinner with this woman.

And you know what else I love about Jackson? She was funny. I’m currently reading her essay collection Life Among the Savages, and there ought to be a tea-snorting warning on the book.

Those essays did for me what perhaps these days blogs do for us: they made Jackson human for me. They showed me the woman behind the marvelous creepy words I have loved for so long. I don’t always like what I learn about artists as people: but I like the sound of Jackson, I like the way she feels in her essays. I like her curiosity and her amusement at the wackiness of the world, and her clear love for her husband and children, and her bemusement at the response to her work.

Maybe it’s naive to say that I think she was a cool person, but I do; and maybe it’s evidence of my own lack of literary rigor that it matters to me, but it does. I would still love her work if I didn’t know anything about her: but knowing a bit of her personal life, and liking what I know, enriches the reading experience somehow for me. I don’t know if it works that way for others, but it’s always been like that for me. I’ve always been fascinated by the person behind the words.

I remember reading Hill House for the first time: the absolute confidence of Jackson’s prose, the small details of Eleanor’s life that told me everything about the howling wind that must live inside her, how glad I was when she escaped in the car and made her bid for freedom… and then the absolute horror of watching it all play out. Theo’s lesbian history revealed with nothing ever said about it, masterful writing. That Jackson is brave enough as a writer to show us the haunting but not the ghost. The effortless way she takes us into people’s heads. And the book scared the bejeepers out of me. That was a great afternoon.

You can start your own conversation now or anytime — just use the “Want to talk?” link on the sidebar or email me.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, talk to me, writing 

Friday pint

10 October 2008 | Comments Off

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

  • Lindsey’s mom (April 2003) — Because sometimes the most human thing you can do is buy vaseline for a hurt snake.

  • The men of Solitaire (April 2003) — Are the men in the book weak? Mileage varies… Plus, wars stories of Life In Television.

  • I believe in stories (May 2003) — More on Bonnie Main, the power of story, and my impending high school reunion.

Have a lovely day.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, life, talk to me, writing 

Friday pint

3 October 2008 | Comments Off

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

A couple of tall drinks and one half-pint today. Clearly I was in a thoughtful mood in March 2003…

Enjoy your Friday.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, talk to me 

Finding the balance

28 September 2008 | Comments Off

hi,

i read your book (solitaire, not dangerous space. apparently my city’s library does not possess copies of dangerous space?) a few months ago. and i thought it was amazing. i’m just letting you know that. i really did like it. now i am so scared of crocodiles, like terribly concerned about the prospect of their existence, in my mind and in the world. this is sad, because i have crocodiles painted on my bedroom walls. but i also thought it was one of the best ways to describe the voices in your mind that are always there ready to poison things. i could never figure out what was happening before.

i also really liked the concepts used. the descriptions were really vivid. you know this, i’m sure. it is, after all, your book. i thought it was really nice, by the way, that you had the relationship between snow and jackal without editorializing about the difficulties of samesex relationships, and focusing the relationship on the people, not how difficult coming out may be, or how prejudiced the surrounding culture was. i’m sure that there are probably many books like this in that respect (i hope) but solitaire was the first one i have read.

i’m fifteen. i guess that explains a lot? or maybe nothing at all.

i think i might be using run-on sentences. i’m sorry if this message is not quite clear. i write the way i talk and so….yes.

what i was actually wondering was what kind of degree and career training you would have to go through to become a facilitator or project manager? what things would be a good idea to major in?

okay, thank you even simply for reading this. i really did enjoy your book.

have a good day,

kelsey

Hi Kelsey,

I’m glad you liked Solitaire. Thanks for taking the time to find me and let me know.

You’ve caught me in a thinking/talking space, so this is a really long response. Hope that’s okay. Sometimes too long can be just as frustrating as too short.

I’m sorry your library doesn’t carry Dangerous Space, although I can understand it — the book is from an independent press, and sometimes either those books don’t come so easily to the attention of libraries, or the libraries choose to spend their budget on books from trade (major) publishers.

My library system has an online order form where I can request that they either buy a specific book, or get it for me on interlibrary loan from another system. Maybe yours will have that service available. If so, the publisher is Aqueduct Press and the publication date is June 2007.

Ah, the crocodiles. Here’s another conversation I had about them, if you’re interested. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t have that voice inside, which I believe is the voice of fear. Not fear of spiders or fear that the cop behind me is about to pull me over for speeding, but the Big Fears that we all carry… I think of them as fears about our own identity. The big insecurities we have about ourselves, the fears that we will be “not good enough” on some level. Some people are terrified of intimacy. Some people are terrified of showing how smart they are. Some people are terrified that they aren’t smart enough. And so on… everyone’s crocodiles are different, because they belong to us, you know? They are tailor-made for us.

But here’s the thing. Crocodiles are part of being human. We all carry them with us. Don’t be fooled by the people who seem like they’ve never had an insecure thought in their lives — they are either covering like mad (because they are afraid if people find out their insecurities, they will use them as weapons), or they are not yet self-aware enough to know that the crocodiles are there. That’s not about age, it’s about maturity. You know it at fifteen, but some people don’t know it at eighty-five. Not being aware doesn’t mean that we don’t have fears — it just means that we will never be able to see how they affect us, and we won’t be able to do as much to help ourselves.

Quieting those crocodile voices is a life-long process. Sometimes you shut them up for a while, and sometimes they come back and bite hard. I don’t think they ever go away completely.

There’s an idea I came across when I was learning about conflict resolution (as part of facilitation stuff, more about that later). The idea is that conflict makes us feel off-balance inside, and people avoid having conflict because we don’t like that feeling — which only means that we repress our disagreement or anger and it builds up and gets worse.

Peole are always looking for ways to not have these feelings. We think that if we feel knocked off-balance by someone’s anger or disagreement, it means we are weak. But that’s not how it works. The real trick is not to keep our balance — it’s to keep finding our balance again and again and again. All through life. Whether we are arguing about who’s turn it is to do the dishes, or listening to the crocodile tell us we will never be good enough writers to sell a book. It’s all about finding our way back to our own center, in small everyday ways and in big life-changing ones.

I have actually been thinking about this a lot lately. There are things happening for me right now that make me feel off-balance, and I’m coming back to center over and over. It’s a skill. It gets easier with practice, and I’m good at it. But even so, I still have to go through it. Being good at it only means that the curve is shorter.

I’m glad Jackal and Snow’s relationship in Solitaire works for you. I think it’s good and important that there are books about coming out, about dealing with cultural disapproval, yadda yadda, but I get tired of reading them. Revealing oneself to others is not the only part of being bisexual or gay or trans or polyamorous or BDSM or queer in any other way. There are all the other human experiences — falling in love, being loved back, not being loved back, discovering sex and finding people to have it with, negotiating relationships through our differences, making a long-term commitment, losing a lover…. All of it. We all have those experiences, regardless of our sexual or gender identity or class or race or religion. We’re all human beings.

There are definitely other books out there that show people just being human without the cultural hetero-normative baggage. You can try books by Nicola Griffith (here’s her website and her blog). I am biased because she’s my partner, but honestly, there is no better writer. She’s an awesome storyteller.

You can also look for Mary Renault’s books about Alexander the Great (seriously, really good stuff): Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games. Or anything by Renault. Melissa Scott writes queer science fiction (try Trouble and Her Friends). Emma Bull’s Bone Dance is a great book about identity in all kinds of ways (here are more of my thoughts about it). Tripping to Somewhere by Kristopher Reisz is about teenage lesbian/bisexual girls searching for the Witches’ Carnival — there’s a lot of angst about love, but not a lot about sexual expression.

Hmm. That’s just off the top of my head, on only one cup of tea. More caffeine would probably bring more titles to mind.

Okay, I went and made another cup of tea, and thought of some more. Elizabeth Lynn’s Watchtower series (start with Watchtower). Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, and The Privilege of the Sword. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.

On to facilitation and project management. I learned these things over a period of time in my 20’s and 30’s, mostly by teaching myself, watching other people, and reading. I did go to a couple of workshops — these sorts of things can be pretty interesting or really lame, and it’s hard to know which ahead of time.

In terms of majors, there are no “facilitation” majors that I’m aware of. Here are the things I think might have some relevance: psychology, organizational development (this is often a grad-level course of stufy, but not always), communication. I majored in theatre, which I’ve actually found quite useful in facilitating (grin). There are generally electives you can take in project management (you’ll sometimes find them in the engineering school or in the business school). You can major in business if it interests you, although honestly I don’t imagine you’ll get much in the way of communication, effective management, facilitation, etc. there. That’s one of the big problems with business education, in my opinion.

Facilitators have to understand about how communication works. Any books, online articles, workshops or electives that deal with topics like active listening, interpersonal communication or interpersonal dynamics, conflict management, negotiation, ladder of assumption, etc. might be interesting. Although personally I would stay away from pop-culture books like “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Anything gender-based, anything that claims that men and women are separate creatures, is not useful right now. Focus on the things that are common to all of us as humans.

The best book I know about communication is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen. This would be a great place to start. Your library should have this or be able to get interlibrary loan for you.

Wikepedia on facilitation and what facilitators do. Just a place to start getting an overview. There are links to books that you could request from the library if you were interested.

But many of those books will be pretty in-depth, so I also recommend you look for some basic books on facilitation skills. I actually suggest starting with your library for this — there are so many books out there on the subject, and no one book is necessarily better as an introduction. They’ll all give you a good overview. Same with project management. It may take a few tries to find something that gives you the big picture as well as some of the basic details.

Project management is a very dry thing to read about and study, but it can be a lot of fun to do. You need to truly enjoy managing details, organizing information, solving problems, and working with other people to find those solutions (that’s a big part of where the facilitation comes in, as well as in keeping the entire project moving forward). Facilitators and PMs don’t do the actual work of the project themselves — that’s what the experts in the group are for. The facilitator/PM is the person who organizes the process, keeps everyone headed toward the goals and deadlines, and has the big picture of the overall activity. So it’s like having a dual focus — on the one hand, you are the Big Picture person that everyone trusts to manage the overall process, and on the other hand you are constantly down in the weeds with all the minute details. That “balance” thing again… And having facilitation skills — communicating clearly, knowing how to have effective conflict (so it doesn’t get personal), making sure you get all the input you need, having good systems for making decisions, etc. — really helps when you are trying to keep everyone marching forward to a plan, because when a person or the project itself loses balance, you can help describe what’s happening and help people find the way to get back to center.

The best thing to do is to find a real live human being to sit down with and talk to about their work. You’ll find all different approaches to project management (some of it all based on schedules and checklists, some of it much more focused on “people management”) and different styles of facilitation (some of it focused on business meetings and activities, some on more personal coaching and interventions, etc.) If your parents have friends or business contacts that might do this work, that’s a place to start. Or if there are any teachers you think have good communication/classroom management skills, ask them for ideas about people to talk to.

Is any of this helpful? If not, or if you still want to talk about it, just say so. I will be happy to focus on whatever you think would be useful.

As for being fifteen, I think age has both everything and nothing to do with anything, if that even makes sense. We are where we are in life. We know what we know. We have the experiences that we have. That’s partly due to how long we’ve been on the planet, but also due to what we do with the experience we have so far. How we use our experiences and thoughts and feelings, our hopes and fears, our sense of joy, whether we are open or closed to the world and other people, all of that stuff. It all goes into making our “self.”

You’re in a stretch of time right now where your brain is madly hard-wiring all kinds of connections. You’re building yourself in very real ways. That self will keep changing and growing, but the actual biochemical and physical changes are pretty massive in one’s teen years and into the 20’s… I always felt like I was standing in the eye of a hurricane, and then bam! I would tumble out of my safe place and get swept up in the storm, and then have to find my balance again (see, it’s all connected…). I still get swept away sometimes (grin) but for different reasons now. And now, it’s more of a choice.

I hope you have a good day too. Write back anytime.

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Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, life, talk to me, writing 

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