#presenting one of them at a conference in spring & the other is getting!! published which will be my first peer-reviewed publication…. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

badartfriend · 3 years ago

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There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”

On June 24, 2015, a year after completing her M.F.A. in creative writing, Dorland did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys, and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular but instead was part of a donation chain, coordinated by surgeons to provide a kidney to a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. There was some risk with the procedure, of course, and a recovery to think about, and a one-kidney life to lead from that point forward. But in truth, Dorland, in her 30s at the time, had been wanting to do it for years. “As soon as I learned I could,” she told me recently, on the phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she and her husband were caring for their toddler son and elderly pit bull (and, in their spare time, volunteering at dog shelters and searching for adoptive families for feral cat litters). “It’s kind of like not overthinking love, you know?”

Several weeks before the surgery, Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where Dorland had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be.

Personally, my childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I didn’t have the opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. A positive outcome of my early life is empathy, that it opened a well of possibility between me and strangers. While perhaps many more people would be motivated to donate an organ to a friend or family member in need, to me, the suffering of strangers is just as real. … Throughout my preparation for becoming a donor … I focused a majority of my mental energy on imagining and celebrating you.

The procedure went well. By a stroke of luck, Dorland would even get to meet the recipient, an Orthodox Jewish man, and take photos with him and his family. In time, Dorland would start posting outside the private group to all of Facebook, celebrating her one-year “kidneyversary” and appearing as a UCLA Health Laker for a Day at the Staples Center to support live-organ donation. But just after the surgery, when she checked Facebook, Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson.

Larson and Dorland had met eight years earlier in Boston. They were just a few years apart in age, and for several years they ran in the same circles, hitting the same events, readings and workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. But in the years since Dorland left town, Larson had leveled up. Her short fiction was published, in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere; she took charge of GrubStreet’s annual Muse and the Marketplace literary conference, and as a mixed-race Asian American, she marshaled the group’s diversity efforts. She also joined a group of published writers that calls itself the Chunky Monkeys (a whimsical name, referring to breaking off little chunks of big projects to share with the other members). One of those writing-group members, Celeste Ng, who wrote “Little Fires Everywhere,” told me that she admires Larson’s ability to create “characters who have these big blind spots.” While they think they’re presenting themselves one way, they actually come across as something else entirely.

When it comes to literary success, the stakes can be pretty low — a fellowship or residency here, a short story published there. But it seemed as if Larson was having the sort of writing life that Dorland once dreamed of having. After many years, Dorland, still teaching, had yet to be published. But to an extent that she once had a writing community, GrubStreet was it. And Larson was, she believed, a close friend.

Over email, on July 21, 2015, Larson answered Dorland’s message with a chirpy reply — “How have you been, my dear?” Dorland replied with a rundown of her next writing residencies and workshops, and as casually as possible, asked: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?”

Only then did Larson gush: “Ah, yes — I did see on Facebook that you donated your kidney. What a tremendous thing!”

Afterward, Dorland would wonder: If she really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?

They wouldn’t cross paths again until the following spring — a brief hello at A.W.P., the annual writing conference, where the subject of Dorland’s kidney went unmentioned. A month later, at the GrubStreet Muse conference in Boston, Dorland sensed something had shifted — not just with Larson but with various GrubStreet eminences, old friends and mentors of hers who also happened to be members of Larson’s writing group, the Chunky Monkeys. Barely anyone brought up what she’d done, even though everyone must have known she’d done it. “It was a little bit like, if you’ve been at a funeral and nobody wanted to talk about it — it just was strange to me,” she said. “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-oriented people.”

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. On June 24, 2016, a Facebook friend of Dorland’s named Tom Meek commented on one of Dorland’s posts.

Sonya read a cool story about giving out a kidney. You came to my mind and I wondered if you were the source of inspiration?

Still impressed you did this.

Dorland was confused. A year earlier, Larson could hardly be bothered to talk about it. Now, at Trident bookstore in Boston, she’d apparently read from a new short story about that very subject. Meek had tagged Larson in his comment, so Dorland thought that Larson must have seen it. She waited for Larson to chime in — to say, “Oh, yes, I’d meant to tell you, Dawn!” or something like that — but there was nothing. Why would Sonya write about it, she wondered, and not tell her?

Six days later, she decided to ask her. Much as she had a year earlier, she sent Larson a friendly email, including one pointed request: “Hey, I heard you wrote a kidney-donation story. Cool! Can I read it?”

‘I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art.’

Ten days later, Larson wrote back saying that yes, she was working on a story “about a woman who receives a kidney, partially inspired by how my imagination took off after learning of your own tremendous donation.” In her writing, she spun out a scenario based not on Dorland, she said, but on something else — themes that have always fascinated her. “I hope it doesn’t feel too weird for your gift to have inspired works of art,” Larson wrote.

Dorland wrote back within hours. She admitted to being “a little surprised,” especially “since we’re friends and you hadn’t mentioned it.” The next day, Larson replied, her tone a bit removed, stressing that her story was “not about you or your particular gift, but about narrative possibilities I began thinking about.”

But Dorland pressed on. “It’s the interpersonal layer that feels off to me, Sonya. … You seemed not to be aware of my donation until I pointed it out. But if you had already kicked off your fictional project at this time, well, I think your behavior is a little deceptive. At least, weird.”

Larson’s answer this time was even cooler. “Before this email exchange,” she wrote, “I hadn’t considered that my individual vocal support (or absence of it) was of much significance.”

Which, though it was shrouded in politesse, was a different point altogether. Who, Larson seemed to be saying, said we were such good friends?

For many years now, Dorland has been working on a sprawling novel, “Econoline,” which interweaves a knowing, present-day perspective with vivid, sometimes brutal but often romantic remembrances of an itinerant rural childhood. The van in the title is, she writes in a recent draft, “blue as a Ty-D-Bowl tablet. Bumbling on the highway, bulky and off-kilter, a junebug in the wind.” The family in the narrative survives on “government flour, canned juice and beans” and “ruler-long bricks of lard” that the father calls “commodities.”

Dorland is not shy about explaining how her past has afforded her a degree of moral clarity that others might not come by so easily. She was raised in near poverty in rural Iowa. Her parents moved around a lot, she told me, and the whole family lived under a stigma. One small consolation was the way her mother modeled a certain perverse self-reliance, rejecting the judgments of others. Another is how her turbulent youth has served as a wellspring for much of her writing. She made her way out of Iowa with a scholarship to Scripps College in California, followed by divinity school at Harvard. Unsure of what to do next, she worked day jobs in advertising in Boston while dabbling in workshops at the GrubStreet writing center. When she noticed classmates cooing over Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping,” she picked up a copy. After inhaling its story of an eccentric small-town upbringing told with sensitive, all-seeing narration, she knew she wanted to become a writer.

At GrubStreet, Dorland eventually became one of several “teaching scholars” at the Muse conference, leading workshops on such topics as “Truth and Taboo: Writing Past Shame.” Dorland credits two members of the Chunky Monkeys group, Adam Stumacher and Chris Castellani, with advising her. But in hindsight, much of her GrubStreet experience is tied up with her memories of Sonya Larson. She thinks they first met at a one-off writing workshop Larson taught, though Larson, for her part, says she doesn’t remember this. Everybody at GrubStreet knew Larson — she was one of the popular, ever-present people who worked there. On nights out with other Grubbies, Dorland remembers Larson getting personal, confiding about an engagement, the death of someone she knew and plans to apply to M.F.A. programs — though Larson now says she shared such things widely. When a job at GrubStreet opened up, Larson encouraged her to apply. Even when she didn’t get it, everyone was so gracious about it, including Larson, that she felt included all the same.

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Now, as she read these strained emails from Larson — about this story of a kidney donation; her kidney donation? — Dorland wondered if everyone at GrubStreet had been playing a different game, with rules she’d failed to grasp. On July 15, 2016, Dorland’s tone turned brittle, even wounded: “Here was a friend entrusting something to you, making herself vulnerable to you. At least, the conclusion I can draw from your responses is that I was mistaken to consider us the friends that I did.”

Larson didn’t answer right away. Three days later, Dorland took her frustrations to Facebook, in a blind item: “I discovered that a writer friend has based a short story on something momentous I did in my own life, without telling me or ever intending to tell me (another writer tipped me off).” Still nothing from Larson.

Dorland waited another day and then sent her another message both in a text and in an email: “I am still surprised that you didn’t care about my personal feelings. … I wish you’d given me the benefit of the doubt that I wouldn’t interfere.” Yet again, no response.

The next day, on July 20, she wrote again: “Am I correct that you do not want to make peace? Not hearing from you sends that message.”

Larson answered this time. “I see that you’re merely expressing real hurt, and for that I am truly sorry,” she wrote on July 21. But she also changed gears a little. “I myself have seen references to my own life in others’ fiction, and it certainly felt weird at first. But I maintain that they have a right to write about what they want — as do I, and as do you.”

Hurt feelings or not, Larson was articulating an ideal — a principle she felt she and all writers ought to live up to. “For me, honoring another’s artistic freedom is a gesture of friendship,” Larson wrote, “and of trust.”

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Sonya Larson in Massachussetts.Credit...Kholood Eid for The New York Times

Like Dawn Dorland, Sonya Larson understands life as an outsider. The daughter of a Chinese American mother and white father, she was brought up in a predominantly white, middle-class enclave in Minnesota, where being mixed-race sometimes confused her. “It took me a while to realize the things I was teased about were intertwined with my race,” she told me over the phone from Somerville, where she lived with her husband and baby daughter. Her dark hair, her slight build: In a short story called “Gabe Dove,” which was picked for the 2017 edition of Best American Short Stories, Larson’s protagonist is a second-generation Asian American woman named Chuntao, who is used to men putting their fingers around her wrist and remarking on how narrow it is, almost as if she were a toy, a doll, a plaything.

Larson’s path toward writing was more conventional than Dorland’s. She started earlier, after her first creative-writing class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When she graduated, in 2005, she moved to Boston and walked into GrubStreet to volunteer the next day. Right away, she became one of a handful of people who kept the place running. In her fiction, Larson began exploring the sensitive subject matter that had always fascinated her: racial dynamics, and people caught between cultures. In time, she moved beyond mere political commentary to revel in her characters’ flaws — like a more socially responsible Philip Roth, though every bit as happy to be profane and fun and provocative. Even as she allows readers to be one step ahead of her characters, to see how they’re going astray, her writing luxuriates in the seductive power that comes from living an unmoored life. “He described thick winding streams and lush mountain gorges,” the rudderless Chuntao narrates in “Gabe Dove,” “obviously thinking I’d enjoy this window into my ancestral country, but in truth, I wanted to slap him.”

Chuntao, or a character with that name, turns up in many of Larson’s stories, as a sort of a motif — a little different each time Larson deploys her. She appears again in “The Kindest,” the story that Larson had been reading from at the Trident bookstore in 2016. Here, Chuntao is married, with an alcohol problem. A car crash precipitates the need for a new organ, and her whole family is hoping the donation will serve as a wake-up call, a chance for Chuntao to redeem herself. That’s when the donor materializes. White, wealthy and entitled, the woman who gave Chuntao her kidney is not exactly an uncomplicated altruist: She is a stranger to her own impulses, unaware of how what she considers a selfless act also contains elements of intense, unbridled narcissism.

In early drafts of the story, the donor character’s name was Dawn. In later drafts, Larson ended up changing the name to Rose. While Dorland no doubt was an inspiration, Larson argues that in its finished form, her story moved far beyond anything Dorland herself had ever said or done. But in every iteration of “The Kindest,” the donor says she wants to meet Chuntao to celebrate, to commune — only she really wants something more, something ineffable, like acknowledgment, or gratitude, or recognition, or love.

Still, they’re not so different, Rose and Chuntao. “I think they both confuse love with worship,” Larson told me. “And they both see love as something they have to go get; it doesn’t already exist inside of them.” All through “The Kindest,” love or validation operates almost like a commodity — a precious elixir that heals all pain. “The thing about the dying,” Chuntao narrates toward the end, “is they command the deepest respect, respect like an underground river resonant with primordial sounds, the kind of respect that people steal from one another.”

They aren’t entirely equal, however. While Chuntao is the story’s flawed hero, Rose is more a subject of scrutiny — a specimen to be analyzed. The study of the hidden motives of privileged white people comes naturally to Larson. “When you’re mixed-race, as I am, people have a way of ‘confiding’ in you,” she once told an interviewer. What they say, often about race, can be at odds with how they really feel. In “The Kindest,” Chuntao sees through Rose from the start. She knows what Rose wants — to be a white savior — and she won’t give it to her. (“So she’s the kindest bitch on the planet?” she says to her husband.) By the end, we may no longer feel a need to change Chuntao. As one critic in the literary journal Ploughshares wrote when the story was published in 2017: “Something has got to be admired about someone who returns from the brink of death unchanged, steadfast in their imperfections.”

For some readers, “The Kindest” is a rope-a-dope. If you thought this story was about Chuntao’s redemption, you’re as complicit as Rose. This, of course, was entirely intentional. Just before she wrote “The Kindest,” Larson helped run a session on race in her graduate program that became strangely contentious. “Many of the writers who identified as white were quite literally seeing the racial dynamics of what we were discussing very differently from the people of color in the room,” she said. “It was as if we were just simply talking past one another, and it was scary.” At the time, she’d been fascinated by “the dress” — that internet meme with a photo some see as black and blue and others as white and gold. Nothing interests Larson more than a thing that can be seen differently by two people, and she saw now how no subject demonstrates that better than race. She wanted to write a story that was like a Rorschach test, one that might betray the reader’s own hidden biases.

When reflecting on Chuntao, Larson often comes back to the character’s autonomy, her nerve. “She resisted,” she told me. Chuntao refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative. “And I admire that. And I think that small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color — and writers of color — in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

Larson and Dorland have each taken and taught enough writing workshops to know that artists, almost by definition, borrow from life. They transform real people and events into something invented, because what is the great subject of art — the only subject, really — if not life itself? This was part of why Larson seemed so unmoved by Dorland’s complaints. Anyone can be inspired by anything. And if you don’t like it, why not write about it yourself?

But to Dorland, this was more than just material. She’d become a public voice in the campaign for live-organ donation, and she felt some responsibility for representing the subject in just the right way. The potential for saving lives, after all, matters more than any story. And yes, this was also her own life — the crystallization of the most important aspects of her personality, from the traumas of her childhood to the transcending of those traumas today. Her proudest moment, she told me, hadn’t been the surgery itself, but making it past the psychological and other clearances required to qualify as a donor. “I didn’t do it in order to heal. I did it because I had healed — I thought.”

The writing world seemed more suspicious to her now. At around the time of her kidney donation, there was another writer, a published novelist, who announced a new book with a protagonist who, in its description, sounded to her an awful lot like the one in “Econoline” — not long after she shared sections of her work in progress with him. That author’s book hasn’t been published, and so Dorland has no way of knowing if she’d really been wronged, but this only added to her sense that the guard rails had fallen off the profession. Beyond unhindered free expression, Dorland thought, shouldn’t there be some ethics? “What do you think we owe one another as writers in community?” she would wonder in an email, several months later, to The Times’s “Dear Sugars” advice podcast. (The show never responded.) “How does a writer like me, not suited to jadedness, learn to trust again after artistic betrayal?”

‘I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma.’

By summer’s end, she and Sonya had forged a fragile truce. “I value our relationship and I regret my part in these miscommunications and misunderstandings,” Larson wrote on Aug. 16, 2016. Not long after, Dorland Googled “kidney” and “Sonya Larson” and a link turned up.

The story was available on Audible — an audio version, put out by a small company called Plympton. Dorland’s dread returned. In July, Larson told her, “I’m still working on the story.” Now here it was, ready for purchase.

She went back and forth about it, but finally decided not to listen to “The Kindest.” When I asked her about it, she took her time parsing that decision. “What if I had listened,” she said, “and just got a bad feeling, and just felt exploited. What was I going to do with that? What was I going to do with those emotions? There was nothing I thought I could do.”

So she didn’t click. “I did what I thought was artistically and emotionally healthy,” she said. “And also, it’s kind of what she had asked me to do.”

Dorland could keep ‘‘The Kindest” out of her life for only so long. In August 2017, the print magazine American Short Fiction published the short story. She didn’t buy a copy. Then in June 2018, she saw that the magazine dropped its paywall for the story. The promo and opening essay on American Short Fiction’s home page had startled her: a photograph of Larson, side-by-side with a shot of the short-fiction titan Raymond Carver. The comparison does make a certain sense: In Carver’s story “Cathedral,” a blind man proves to have better powers of perception than a sighted one; in “The Kindest,” the white-savior kidney donor turns out to need as much salvation as the Asian American woman she helped. Still, seeing Larson anointed this way was, to say the least, destabilizing.

Then she started to read the story. She didn’t get far before stopping short. Early on, Rose, the donor, writes a letter to Chuntao, asking to meet her.

I myself know something of suffering, but from those experiences I’ve acquired both courage and perseverance. I’ve also learned to appreciate the hardship that others are going through, no matter how foreign. Whatever you’ve endured, remember that you are never alone. … As I prepared to make this donation, I drew strength from knowing that my recipient would get a second chance at life. I withstood the pain by imagining and rejoicing in YOU.

Here, to Dorland’s eye, was an echo of the letter she’d written to her own recipient — and posted on her private Facebook group — rejiggered and reworded, yet still, she believed, intrinsically hers. Dorland was amazed. It had been three years since she donated her kidney. Larson had all that time to launder the letter — to rewrite it drastically or remove it — and she hadn’t bothered.

She showed the story’s letter to her husband, Chris, who had until that point given Larson the benefit of the doubt.

“Oh,” he said.

Everything that happened two years earlier, during their email melée, now seemed like gaslighting. Larson had been so insistent that Dorland was being out of line — breaking the rules, playing the game wrong, needing something she shouldn’t even want. “Basically, she’d said, ‘I think you’re being a bad art friend,’” Dorland told me. That argument suddenly seemed flimsy. Sure, Larson had a right to self-expression — but with someone else’s words? Who was the bad art friend now?

Before she could decide what to do, there came another shock. A few days after reading “The Kindest,” Dorland learned that the story was the 2018 selection for One City One Story, a common-reads program sponsored by the Boston Book Festival. That summer, some 30,000 copies of “The Kindest” would be distributed free all around town. An entire major U.S. city would be reading about a kidney donation — with Sonya Larson as the author.

This was when Dawn Dorland decided to push back — first a little, and then a lot. This wasn’t about art anymore; not Larson’s anyway. It was about her art, her letter, her words, her life. She shopped for a legal opinion: Did Larson’s use of that letter violate copyright law? Even getting a lawyer to look into that one little question seemed too expensive. But that didn’t stop her from contacting American Short Fiction and the Boston Book Festival herself with a few choice questions: What was their policy on plagiarism? Did they know they were publishing something that used someone else’s words? She received vague assurances they’d get back to her.

While waiting, she also contacted GrubStreet’s leadership: What did this supposedly supportive, equitable community have to say about plagiarism? She emailed the Bread Loaf writing conference in Vermont, where Larson once had a scholarship: What would they do if one of their scholars was discovered to have plagiarized? On privacy grounds, Bread Loaf refused to say if “The Kindest” was part of Larson’s 2017 application. But Dorland found more groups with a connection to Larson to notify, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics and Writers.

When the Boston Book Festival told her they would not share the final text of the story, Dorland went a step further. She emailed two editors at The Boston Globe — wouldn’t they like to know if the author of this summer’s citywide common-reads short story was a plagiarist? And she went ahead and hired a lawyer, Jeffrey Cohen, who agreed she had a claim — her words, her letter, someone else’s story. On July 3, 2018, Cohen sent the book festival a cease-and-desist letter, demanding they hold off on distributing “The Kindest” for the One City One Story program, or risk incurring damages of up to $150,000 under the Copyright Act.

From Larson’s point of view, this wasn’t just ludicrous, it was a stickup. Larson had found her own lawyer, James Gregorio, who on July 17 replied that Dorland’s actions constitute “harassment, defamation per se and tortious interference with business and contractual relations.” Despite whatever similarities exist between the letters, Larson’s lawyer believed there could be no claim against her because, among other reasons, these letters that donors write are basically a genre; they follow particular conventions that are impossible to claim as proprietary. In July, Dorland’s lawyer suggested settling with the book festival for $5,000 (plus an attribution at the bottom of the story, or perhaps a referral link to a kidney-donor site). Larson’s camp resisted talks when they learned that Dorland had contacted The Globe.

‘This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story.'

In reality, Larson was pretty vulnerable: an indemnification letter in her contract with the festival meant that if Dorland did sue, she would incur the costs. What no one had counted on was that Dorland, in late July, would stumble upon a striking new piece of evidence. Searching online for more mentions of “The Kindest,” she saw something available for purchase. At first this seemed to be a snippet of the Audible version of the story, created a year before the American Short Fiction version. But in fact, this was something far weirder: a recording of an even earlier iteration of the story. When Dorland listened to this version, she heard something very different — particularly the letter from the donor.

Dorland’s letter:

Larson’s audio version of the story:

My own childhood was marked by trauma and abuse; I wasn’t given an opportunity to form secure attachments with my family of origin. But in adulthood that experience provided a strong sense of empathy. While others might desire to give to a family member or friend, to me the suffering of strangers is just as real.

“I almost fell off my chair,” Dorland said. “I’m thinking, When did I record my letter with a voice actor? Because this voice actor was reading me the paragraph about my childhood trauma. To me it was just bizarre.” It confirmed, in her eyes, that Larson had known she had a problem: She had altered the letter after Dorland came to her with her objections in 2016.

Dorland’s lawyer increased her demand to $10,000 — an amount Dorland now says was to cover her legal bills, but that the other side clearly perceived as another provocation. She also contacted her old GrubStreet friends — members of the Chunky Monkeys whom she now suspected had known all about what Larson was doing. “Why didn’t either of you check in with me when you knew that Sonya’s kidney story was related to my life?” she emailed the group’s founders, Adam Stumacher and Jennifer De Leon. Stumacher responded, “I have understood from the start this is a work of fiction.” Larson’s friends were lining up behind her.

In mid-August, Dorland learned that Larson had made changes to “The Kindest” for the common-reads program. In this new version, every similar phrase in the donor’s letter was reworded. But there was something new: At the end of the letter, instead of closing with “Warmly,” Larson had switched it to “Kindly.”

With that one word — the signoff she uses in her emails — Dorland felt trolled. “She thought that it would go to press and be read by the city of Boston before I realized that she had jabbed me in the eye,” Dorland said. (Larson, for her part, told me that the change was meant as “a direct reference to the title; it’s really as simple as that.”) Dorland’s lawyer let the festival know she wasn’t satisfied — that she still considered the letter in the story to be a derivative work of her original. If the festival ran the story, she’d sue.

This had become Sonya Larson’s summer of hell. What had started with her reaching heights she’d never dreamed of — an entire major American city as her audience, reading a story she wrote, one with an important message about racial dynamics — was ending with her under siege, her entire career in jeopardy, and all for what she considered no reason at all: turning life into art, the way she thought that any writer does.

Larson had tried working the problem. When, in June, an executive from the book festival first came to her about Dorland, Larson offered to “happily” make changes to “The Kindest.” “I remember that letter, and jotted down phrases that I thought were compelling, though in the end I constructed the fictional letter to suit the character of Rose,” she wrote to the festival. “I admit, however, that I’m not sure what they are — I don’t have a copy of that letter.” There was a moment, toward the end of July, when it felt as if she would weather the storm. The festival seemed fine with the changes she made to the story. The Globe did publish something, but with little impact.

Then Dorland found that old audio version of the story online, and the weather changed completely. Larson tried to argue that this wasn’t evidence of plagiarism, but proof that she’d been trying to avoid plagiarism. Her lawyer told The Globe that Larson had asked the audio publisher to make changes to her story on July 15, 2016 — in the middle of her first tense back-and-forth with Dorland — because the text “includes a couple sentences that I’d excerpted from a real-life letter.” In truth, Larson had been frustrated by the situation. “She seemed to think that she had ownership over the topic of kidney donation,” Larson recalled in an email to the audio publisher in 2018. “It made me realize that she is very obsessive.”

It was then, in August 2018, facing this new onslaught of plagiarism claims, that Larson stopped playing defense. She wrote a statement to The Globe declaring that anyone who sympathized with Dorland’s claims afforded Dorland a certain privilege. “My piece is fiction,” she wrote. “It is not her story, and my letter is not her letter. And she shouldn’t want it to be. She shouldn’t want to be associated with my story’s portrayal and critique of white-savior dynamics. But her recent behavior, ironically, is exhibiting the very blindness I’m writing about, as she demands explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of color’s work.”

Here was a new argument, for sure. Larson was accusing Dorland of perverting the true meaning of the story — making it all about her, and not race and privilege. Larson’s friend Celeste Ng agrees, at least in part, that the conflict seemed racially coded. “There’s very little emphasis on what this must be like for Sonya,” Ng told me, “and what it is like for writers of color, generally — to write a story and then be told by a white writer, ‘Actually, you owe that to me.’”

‘I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities.’

But Ng also says this wasn’t just about race; it was about art and friendship. Ng told me that Larson’s entire community believed Dorland needed to be stopped in her tracks — to keep an unreasonable writer from co-opting another writer’s work on account of just a few stray sentences, and destroying that writer’s reputation in the process. “This is not someone that I am particularly fond of,” Ng told me, “because she had been harassing my friend and a fellow writer. So we were quite exercised, I will say.”

Not that it mattered. Dorland would not stand down. And so, on Aug. 13, Deborah Porter, the executive director of the Boston Book Festival, told Larson that One City One Story was canceled for the year. “There is seemingly no end to this,” she wrote, “and we cannot afford to spend any more time or resources.” When the Chunky Monkeys’ co-founder, Jennifer De Leon, made a personal appeal, invoking the white-savior argument, the response from Porter was like the slamming of a door. “That story should never have been submitted to us in the first place,” Porter wrote. “This is not about a white savior narrative. It’s about us and our sponsor and our board not being sued if we distribute the story. You owe us an apology.”

Porter then emailed Larson, too. “It seems to me that we have grounds to sue you,” she wrote to Larson. “Kindly ask your friends not to write to us.”

Here, it would seem, is where the conflict ought to end — Larson in retreat, “The Kindest” canceled. But neither side was satisfied. Larson, her reputation hanging by a thread, needed assurances that Dorland would stop making her accusations. Dorland still wanted Larson to explicitly, publicly admit that her words were in Larson’s story. She couldn’t stop wondering — what if Larson published a short-story collection? Or even a novel that spun out of “The Kindest?” She’d be right back here again.

On Sept. 6, 2018, Dorland’s lawyer raised her demand to $15,000, and added a new demand that Larson promise to pay Dorland $180,000 should she ever violate the settlement terms (which included never publishing “The Kindest” again). Larson saw this as an even greater provocation; her lawyer replied three weeks later with a lengthy litany of allegedly defamatory claims that Dorland had made about Larson. Who, he was asking, was the real aggressor here? How could anyone believe that Dorland was the injured party? “It is a mystery exactly how Dorland was damaged,” Larson’s new lawyer, Andrew Epstein, wrote. “My client’s gross receipts from ‘The Kindest’ amounted to $425.”

To Dorland, all this felt intensely personal. Someone snatches her words, and then accuses her of defamation too? Standing down seemed impossible now: How could she admit to defaming someone, she thought, when she was telling the truth? She’d come too far, spent too much on legal fees to quit. “I was desperate to recoup that money,” Dorland told me. She reached out to an arbitration-and-mediation service in California. When Andrew Epstein didn’t respond to the mediator, she considered suing Larson in small-claims court.

On Dec. 26, Dorland emailed Epstein, asking if he was the right person to accept the papers when she filed a lawsuit. As it happened, Larson beat her to the courthouse. On Jan. 30, 2019, Dorland and her lawyer, Cohen, were both sued in federal court, accused of defamation and tortious interference — that is, spreading lies about Larson and trying to tank her career.

There’s a moment in Larson’s short story “Gabe Dove” — also pulled from real life — where Chuntao notices a white family picnicking on a lawn in a park and is awed to see that they’ve all peacefully fallen asleep. “I remember going to college and seeing people just dead asleep on the lawn or in the library,” Larson told me. “No fear that harm will come to you or that people will be suspicious of you. That’s a real privilege right there.”

Larson’s biggest frustration with Dorland’s accusations was that they stole attention away from everything she’d been trying to accomplish with this story. “You haven’t asked me one question about the source of inspiration in my story that has to do with alcoholism, that has to do with the Chinese American experience. It’s extremely selective and untrue to pin a source of a story on just one thing. And this is what fiction writers know.” To ask if her story is about Dorland is, Larson argues, not only completely beside the point, but ridiculous. “I have no idea what Dawn is thinking. I don’t, and that’s not my job to know. All I can tell you about is how it prompted my imagination.” That also, she said, is what artists do. “We get inspired by language, and we play with that language, and we add to it and we change it and we recontextualize it. And we transform it.”

When Larson discusses “The Kindest” now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. “It’s like saying that ‘Moby Dick’ is a book about whales,” she said. As for owing Dorland a heads-up about the use of that donation, Larson becomes more indignant, stating that no artist has any such responsibility. “If I walk past my neighbor and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden, do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbor, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story? I just couldn’t disagree more.”

But this wasn’t a neighbor. This was, ostensibly, a friend.

“There are married writer couples who don’t let each other read each other’s work,” Larson said. “I have no obligation to tell anyone what I’m working on.”

By arguing what she did is standard practice, Larson is asking a more provocative question: If you find her guilty of infringement, who’s next? Is any writer safe? “I read Dawn’s letter and I found it interesting,” she told me. “I never copied the letter. I was interested in these words and phrases because they reminded me of the language used by white-savior figures. And I played with this language in early drafts of my story. Fiction writers do this constantly.”

This is the same point her friends argue when defending her to me. “You take a seed, right?” Adam Stumacher said. “And then that’s the starting point for a story. That’s not what the story is about.” This is where “The Kindest” shares something with “Cat Person,” the celebrated 2017 short story in The New Yorker by Kristen Roupenian that, in a recent essay in Slate, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claimed used elements of her life story. That piece prompted a round of outrage from Writer Twitter (“I have held every human I’ve ever met upside down by the ankles,” the author Lauren Groff vented, “and shaken every last detail that I can steal out of their pockets”).

“The Kindest,” however, contains something that “Cat Person” does not: an actual piece of text that even Larson says was inspired by Dorland’s original letter. At some point, Larson must have realized that was the story’s great legal vulnerability. Did she ever consider just pulling it out entirely?

“Yeah, that absolutely was an option,” Larson said. “We could have easily treated the same moment in that story using a phone call, or some other literary device.” But once she made those changes for One City One Story, she said, the festival had told her the story was fine as is. (That version of “The Kindest” ended up in print elsewhere, as part of an anthology published in 2019 by Ohio University’s Swallow Press.) All that was left, she believes, was a smear campaign. “It’s hard for me to see what the common denominator of all of her demands has been, aside from wanting to punish me in some way.”

Dorland filed a counterclaim against Larson on April 24, 2020, accusing Larson of violating the copyright of her letter and intentional infliction of emotional distress — sleeplessness, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss “and several incidents of self-harm.” Dorland says she’d had some bouts of slapping herself, which dissipated after therapy. (This wasn’t her first lawsuit claiming emotional distress. A few years earlier, Dorland filed papers in small-claims court against a Los Angeles writing workshop where she’d taught, accusing the workshop of mishandling a sexual-harassment report she had made against a student. After requesting several postponements, she withdrew the complaint.) As for her new complaint against Larson, the judge knocked out the emotional-distress claim this past February, but the question of whether “The Kindest” violates Dorland’s copyrighted letter remains in play.

The litigation crept along quietly until earlier this year, when the discovery phase uncorked something unexpected — a trove of documents that seemed to recast the conflict in an entirely new way. There, in black and white, were pages and pages of printed texts and emails between Larson and her writer friends, gossiping about Dorland and deriding everything about her — not just her claim of being appropriated but the way she talked publicly about her kidney donation.

“I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination,” Whitney Scharer, a GrubStreet co-worker and fellow Chunky Monkey, texted to Larson in October 2015 — the day after Larson sent her first draft of “The Kindest” to the group. Dorland had announced she’d be walking in the Rose Bowl parade, as an ambassador for nondirected organ donations. “I’m thrilled to be part of their public face,” Dorland wrote, throwing in a few hashtags: #domoreforeachother and #livingkidneydonation.

Larson replied: “Oh, my god. Right? The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing. … Of course, I feel evil saying this and can’t really talk with anyone about it.”

“I don’t know,” Scharer wrote. “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.”

“Right??” Larson wrote. “#domoreforeachother. Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS?”

Among her friends, Larson clearly explained the influence of Dorland’s letter. In January 2016, she texted two friends: “I think I’m DONE with the kidney story but I feel nervous about sending it out b/c it literally has sentences that I verbatim grabbed from Dawn’s letter on FB. I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to �� that letter was just too damn good. I’m not sure what to do … feeling morally compromised/like a good artist but a shitty person.”

That summer, when Dorland emailed Larson with her complaints, Larson was updating the Chunky Monkeys regularly, and they were encouraging her to stand her ground. “This is all very excruciating,” Larson wrote on July 18, 2016. “I feel like I am becoming the protagonist in my own story: She wants something from me, something that she can show to lots of people, and I’m not giving it.”

“Maybe she was too busy waving from her floating thing at a Macy’s Day parade,” wrote Jennifer De Leon, “instead of, you know, writing and stuff.”

Others were more nuanced. “It’s totally OK for Dawn to be upset,” Celeste Ng wrote, “but it doesn’t mean that Sonya did anything wrong, or that she is responsible for fixing Dawn’s hurt feelings.”

“I can understand the anxiety,” Larson replied. “I just think she’s trying to control something that she doesn’t have the ability or right to control.”

“The first draft of the story really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Calvin Hennick wrote. “But Sonya didn’t publish that draft. … She created a new, better story that used Dawn’s Facebook messages as initial inspiration, but that was about a lot of big things, instead of being about the small thing of taking down Dawn Dorland.”

On Aug. 15, 2016 — a day before telling Dorland, “I value our relationship” — Larson wrote in a chat with Alison Murphy: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. Or at least about this particular narcissistic dynamic, especially as it relates to race. The woman is a gold mine!”

Later on, Larson was even more emboldened. “If she tries to come after me, I will FIGHT BACK!” she wrote Murphy in 2017. Murphy suggested renaming the story “Kindly, Dawn,” prompting Larson to reply, “HA HA HA.”

Dorland learned about the emails — a few hundred pages of them — from her new lawyer, Suzanne Elovecky, who read them first and warned her that they might be triggering. When she finally went through them, she saw what she meant. The Chunky Monkeys knew the donor in “The Kindest” was Dorland, and they were laughing at her. Everything she’d dreaded and feared about raising her voice — that so many writers she revered secretly dismissed and ostracized her; that absolutely no one except her own lawyers seemed to care that her words were sitting there, trapped inside someone else’s work of art; that a slew of people, supposedly her friends, might actually believe she’d donated an organ just for the likes — now seemed completely confirmed, with no way to sugarcoat it. “It’s like I became some sort of dark-matter mascot to all of them somehow,” she said.

But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.” All the gossiping about Dorland, now made public, would seem to put Larson into a corner. But many of the writer friends quoted in those texts and emails (those who responded to requests for comment) say they still stand behind her; if they were ridiculing Dorland, it was all in the service of protecting their friend. “I’m very fortunate to have friends in my life who I’ve known for 10, 20, over 30 years,” Larson told me. “I do not, and have never, considered Dawn one of them.”

What about the texts where she says that Dorland is behaving just like her character? Here, Larson chose her words carefully. “Dawn might behave like the character in my story,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that the character in my story is behaving like Dawn. I know she’s trying to work through every angle she can to say that I’ve done something wrong. I have not done anything wrong.”

In writing, plagiarism is a straight-up cardinal sin: If you copy, you’re wrong. But in the courts, copyright infringement is an evolving legal concept. The courts are continuously working out the moment when someone’s words cross over into property that can be protected; as with any intellectual property, the courts have to balance the protections of creators with a desire not to stifle innovation. One major help to Dorland, however, is the rights that the courts have given writers over their own unpublished letters, even after they’re sent to someone else. J.D. Salinger famously prevented personal letters from being quoted by a would-be biographer. They were his property, the courts said, not anyone else’s. Similarly, Dorland could argue that this letter, despite having made its way onto Facebook, qualifies.

Let’s say the courts agree that Dorland’s letter is protected. What then? Larson’s main defense may be that the most recent version of the letter in “The Kindest” — the one significantly reworded for the book festival — simply doesn’t include enough material from Dorland’s original to rise to the level of infringement. This argument is, curiously, helped by how Larson has always, when it has come down to it, acknowledged Dorland’s letter as an influence. The courts like it when you don’t hide what you’ve done, according to Daniel Novack, chairman of the New York State Bar Association’s committee on media law. “You don’t want her to be punished for being clear about where she got it from,” he said. “If anything, that helps people find the original work.”

Larson’s other strategy is to argue that by repurposing snippets of the letter in this story, it qualifies as “transformative use,” and could never be mistaken for the original. Arguing transformative use might require arguing that a phrase of Larson’s like “imagining and rejoicing in YOU” has a different inherent meaning from the phrase in Dorland’s letter “imagining and celebrating you.” While they are similar, Larson’s lawyer, Andrew Epstein, argues that the story overall is different, and makes the letter different. “It didn’t steal from the letter,” he told me, “but it added something new and it was a totally different narrative.”

Larson put it more bluntly to me: “Her letter, it wasn’t art! It was informational. It doesn’t have market value. It’s like language that we glean from menus, from tombstones, from tweets. And Dorland ought to know this. She’s taken writing workshops.”

Transformative use most often turns up in cases of commentary or satire, or with appropriation artists like Andy Warhol. The idea is not to have such strong copyright protections that people can’t innovate. While Larson may have a case, one potential wrinkle is a recent federal ruling, just earlier this year, against the Andy Warhol Foundation. An appeals court determined that Warhol’s use of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith as the basis for his own work of art was not a distinctive enough transformation. Whether Larson’s letter is derivative, in the end, may be up to a jury to decide. Dorland’s lawyer, meanwhile, can point to that 2016 text message of Larson’s, when she says she tried to reword the letter but just couldn’t. (“That letter was just too damn good.”)

“The whole reason they want it in the first place is because it’s special,” Dorland told me. “Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother.”

If anything, the letter, for Dorland, has only grown more important over time. While Larson openly wonders why Dorland doesn’t just write about her donation her own way — “I feel instead of running the race herself, she’s standing on the sidelines and trying to disqualify everybody else based on minor technicalities,” Larson told me — Dorland sometimes muses, however improbably, that because vestiges of her letter remain in Larson’s story, Larson might actually take her to court and sue her for copyright infringement if she published any parts of the letter. It’s almost as if Dorland believes that Larson, by getting there first, has grabbed some of the best light, leaving nothing for her.

Last year, as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group. “I know virtually all of them,” Dorland said. “It was just like seeing friends.”

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland’s name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat. Larson’s life had moved on in so many ways. She’d published another story. She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the importance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who’d branded her a plagiarist, watching her. “It really just freaks me out,” Larson said. “At times I’ve felt kind of stalked.”

Dorland remembers that moment, too, seeing Larson’s face fall, convinced she was the reason. There was, for lack of a better word, a connection. When I asked how she felt in that moment, Dorland was slow to answer. It’s not as if she meant for it to happen, she said. Still, it struck her as telling.

“To me? It seemed like she had dropped the facade for a minute. I’m not saying that — I don’t want her to feel scared, because I’m not threatening. To me, it seemed like she knew she was full of shit, to put it bluntly — like, in terms of our dispute, that she was going to be found out.”

Then Dorland quickly circled back and rejected the premise of the question. There was nothing strange at all, Dorland said, about her watching three different events featuring Larson. She was watching, she said, to conduct due diligence for her ongoing case. And, she added, seeing Larson there seemed to be working for her as a sort of exposure therapy — to defuse the hurt she still feels, by making Larson something more real and less imagined, to diminish the space that she takes up in her mind, in her life.

“I think it saves me from villainizing Sonya,” she wrote me later, after our call. “I proceed in this experience as an artist and not an adversary, learning and absorbing everything, making use of it eventually.”

Robert Kolker is a writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. In 2020, his book “Hidden Valley Road” became a selection of Oprah’s Book Club and a New York Times best seller. His last article for the magazine was about the legacy of Jan Baalsrud, the Norwegian World War II hero.

Correction: Oct. 6, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the GrubStreet writing center's action after Dorland's initial questions about potential plagiarism. It did reply; it's not the case that she received no response. The article also misstated Dorland’s thoughts on what could happen if she loses the court case. Dorland said she fears that Larson would be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she publish her letter to the end recipient of the kidney donation chain. It is not the case that she said she fears that Larson might be able to sue her for copyright infringement should she write anything about organ donation.

#emmie this for you

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southwindscoffee · 4 years ago

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inspiration, overwhelm, patience

The RWA conference is going on right now. I’ve never attended before, and I’m appreciating how much work went into it, especially given the challenge of holding such a large and involved event online. Kudos to everyone involved.

Since yesterday, I’ve been listening to online presentations by romance authors and hearing all sorts of good information on writing, marketing, agents, and so on.

Too much good information, honestly.

And I’m getting anxious. It’s info-overload.

I feel like I need to redesign my website, send out a newsletter, and write a whole new series all at once. Or I should have done it already. Where’s that high concept I want?

And—

I just crashed.

I do this. Do you? Do you get a surge of inspiration, get revving to go, then look around and think, How on earth am I going to get there from here? I have so much to do! Too much.

So.

Here’s blog post to process all these ideas. All this inspiration.

A blog post on patience. On centering. On focus.

On what do I do when I have too many ideas. Those times, like right now, when I’m trying to listen to a webcast on plotting, read a book on craft, write a romance book, listen to music that inspires a different book, buy a new refrigerator (or answer my husband’s questions about so doing) and fix lunch all at the same time.

What do I do?

I scream.

Then—

I stop.

I just stop.

And I go back to the basics. I turn off the noise. I can’t focus on all this media at once. I can only do one thing at a time, perhaps to background music.

Then, I focus on what’s most important. Julia Cameron says, “As artists, we do much better trying to keep things simple.”

Keep things simple. That means I need to focus on the most important thing.

For me, writing is the most important thing (after basic health and safety and my family, obvs).

I have to remember to “get my reps in,” as James Clear says. Action, not motion, cures anxiety.

In other words, the only thing that cures my writing anxiety is physically writing. I need to take action. Get words down on paper. Pull out the laptop or piece of paper and start pouring my brain out on the screen or notebook. Moving my fingers. Getting my ink out of my pen.

Action in this instance does not mean the following: thinking about plot, reading books on writing, attending lectures on how to market, or reading other people’s books or watching movies to analyze structure. Those are all important, but if I’m overwhelmed, they don’t help me.

I need the patience to know I’ll get to all of those. That I can do everything. Just not at once. To get the patience, I write down my notes on how to improve my website, my newsletter, my search for an agent and set them aside with the knowledge that I will get to them if they are important. (Thank you, David Allen for strategies on getting things done.)

Instead, all I can do to stop being so overwhelmed is to focus on writing, which is the only thing I need to do. The thing on which everything else stands.

The thing that cures my anxiety.

“Not working is what makes an artist crazy.” Again, Julia Cameron comes to my rescue today. “There is dignity in work.” In other words, the solution is to focus on the writing.

(She also recommends comparing ourselves solely to ourselves. That soothes overwhelm, too. I can just turn inward and look at my own projects. I invite you to do so for yourself, too.)

So, in that vein: this is what I’m working on. I’m comparing myself to myself. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, I invite you to focus on yourself as well.

New Adult Novella: (Almost) completed project. I wrote a 40,000 word novella to be published February 3, 2021 (my husband’s birthday) in the All American Boy project. I have the cover and title and the draft done. It’s just being edited. The story is about two high school grads in a small Sonoma town who have been dancing around each other since Freshman year, secretly falling for each other. They finally have their first kiss and are about to go to being more than friends, when they’re stopped in their tracks. She has to choose between him and her dreams or her family that needs her. I really love these characters and what they go through to get to their love.

Contemporary romance/third book in the Love in Translation series (Penumbra): 100,000 words written. For the past two weeks I’ve been focusing on this book, trying to get it edited by the end of the month. It needs more time than that, but I’m not giving up on it because I love this story. This is an interracial couple, friends to lovers, hiking along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. It follows Sol and Sombra. This is my focus today.

Contemporary romance/The Lighthouse. This book I spent all year last year writing and trashed because it wasn’t good enough. I’ve rewritten half of it, and I like it now. It’s more like what I originally intended. I’m planning on spending half of next month polishing it up. This is about a movie star who crashes into the life of a Hollywood-hating, reclusive lighthouse keeper.

LGBTQ/Historical romance. A soul-deep passion project for me, a m/m book set in midcentury modern Palm Springs. Again, this one’s halfway done. The other half of next month is set aside to finish it.

Interim passion project to fill up the corners. This is the LGBTQ book that came to me fully plotted in the shower. That’s my reward for when I finish my writing goal for the day. This one’s m/m too.

That looks like a lot, but really, I’m focusing on one book at a time. And I have periods set aside to work on the three books that are the most done. Plus, a reward for finishing what I need to do.

That soothes anxiety.

But other projects lurk in the background calling to me. I have another m/m book I’m totally excited about and have written half of it. I’ll finish it after the above. I have a series of four contemporary romance books (starting with a single dad country singer) started. Oh, and a branch into Viking books and some nonfiction.

So, no wonder I’m feeling overwhelmed by attending RWA. I look at all these ideas and think, Christ, I already have my long and developed list of projects to work on that make me happy.

But I can face the inspiration I’m getting all weekend by taking notes, being patient with what I’m already doing, and trust that it all will work out.

I wish you your own inspiration. And patience. And fun.

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memorylang · 4 years ago

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Fathers’ Day, Familiarity and Faith | #38 | June 2020

If my COVID-19 experiences were a Netflix Original Series, I feel someone could title it, "The Groundskeeper."

Synopsis: Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Mongolia, now back in Nevada, learns a thing or two about hedge trimming and much more about life living.

The inspirational hit series stars award-winning memoirist Daniel Lindbergh Lang, director and editor. “Please support the official release.”

Quirky thoughts keep me sane. More on these later, of course.

The U.S. celebrated Father’s Day 2020 on June 21, so I commemorate it with reflections from being my father’s son.

The adventures follow both my Mothers’ Day reflections (#36) and Easter in America stories (#35). I focus now on continued COVID-19 adventures in yard work, sorting and reminiscing.

Chronologically, we pick up from my stateside Week 11 (May 15-21), when my sisters came home from their unis’ spring semesters. With them as collaborators, I continued sorting our family’s memorabilia. After a few weeks’ interlude 'round Memorial Day, big changes occurred Weeks 14 through 16 (June 5-25) through Fathers’ Day.

I also consider Pentecost and the Spirit. Easter 2020 ended Sunday, May 31, so we’re in a fruitful new time. In fact, I write here results from the smattering of routines I shared before.

Lastly, to clarify, many assume my dad’s Asian. But that’s untrue. He’s Austrian-American. That’s where I get my “Lang” surname. Ethnically, I’m about half Austrian. Culturally, too, Dad’s family influenced me far more than Mom’s when I grew up. My mom was ethnically full Chinese, hence that half.

Now back to Dad!

Father’s Perspective on My Boyhood

During my 2020 time home since Peace Corps’ evacuation, Dad often prods me to take on projects he sees around the yard. So, I do yard work. I don’t like desert heat, so I usually work the daily tasks an hour or two at dawn, sometimes dusk. Picture three months this way.

But Dad would tend to demand a certain perfection on many projects, expecting me out there working when there’s work to do. I’d rather let nature do as it pleases. Peace Corps experiences taught me decorated yards generally feel overrated. When I’m older, I feel I’d much rather have my family frequent parks to get our yard fix. Nonetheless, yard work lets me chat with God, who reminds me empathize.

It is difficult to say, "I serve the Father," if I do not serve my father.

With this in mind, I consider the patient progress of waiting while working often.

Dad grew up in rural America’s Midwest from the mid-20th century. Dad’s parents and community were largely Austrian-American Catholics. Dad’s grandfather immigrated with Dad’s great-grandfather because land in Austria was scarce, late-19th century, yet plentiful in Kansas. My dad grew up on a farm as a third-generation Austrian-American. He funded his higher ed. through U.S. military service and numerous side jobs, including those in teaching and sales.

Through Dad, I’m a fourth-generation Austrian-American—though, only second-generation Chinese-American, through Mom. I wasn’t quite on a farm, having grown up between Midwestern suburbs and an urban West. Still, Dad regularly tasked siblings and I with yard work.

An Energetic Kid, Ages 4-7

Now this gets interesting!

This mid-May 2020, my younger sister and I unearthed Christmas letters our parents (mostly Dad) had written to Dad’s siblings—my uncles and aunts—since before 2000. Turns out, our mom kept hard copies in the bins beside her desk. From these, Sister and I read pretty enjoyable pieces about our child selves.

Here I share Dad’s tales from grade school me in Indiana (used with permission):

2001: "Daniel is 4 years old now and is looking forward to kindergarten. He likes outdoor activities and he is quite strong for his age. He can do a lot of sit ups and push ups already. He likes to walk with [his mom] at the airport, which is nearby."

2002: "Daniel is five years old. He is in kindergarten. He is [...] very competitive. He is in the same school as [his older brother] and is rapidly learning to read now. He is good at math, and he studies very hard."

2003: "Daniel is six years old. He is very competitive and naughty. He always keeps track of the books he reads and comes home to tell us how many books he has finished. His goal is to reach 100 books this year. He is over 90 already. Well, he likes to pester [his brother a lot]. He thinks that is fun. [...]"

2004: "Daniel is seven. He is goal oriented and a 'do'er. He is good at making all kinds of crafts. He is our family's talented teacher. He taught [his younger sister] how to read before she went to kindergarten. He also gives homework assignments to the others, except [his older brother]. He always pesters [his brother] as usual."

God graced me with energy as a kid.

I noticed three themes. For one, I seemed to follow Dad’s lead in filling my time productively. He served in the U.S. Army National Guard and emphasized self-discipline. As a civilian family practitioner, too, he advocated for daily exercises, such as sit-ups, push-ups and walking. I seemed to follow suit.

On the other hand, I was a kiddo with an older brother, and I didn’t mind expending plenty spare energy to bother him. Thankfully I stopped pestering when I grew up with enough self-awareness to know good people don’t intentionally troll. Uni helped.

Curiously, I noticed the letters seemed to note many of my interests resembling Mom’s. Arts, reading and studying seemed more like Mom’s interests than Dad’s, yet I hadn’t realized my similarities to Mom back then. Of course, Dad values education, too.

Studious Beyond Belief, Ages 13-19

As I went through elementary school, Dad’s military service included deployments overseas to Afghanistan (2005) and Iraq (2007). In 2008, our family moved from southern Indiana to North Las Vegas, Nev., where I started middle school. Since my younger sister and I hadn’t found letters from Dad’s years deployed with the others letter, we figured Mom wrote them. By 2009’s end, Dad retired as a lieutenant colonel. But he continued work elsewhere, including in a dozen nations to indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Here were Christmas letters from my adolescence on. Coincidentally, I noticed the first couple we found both came from my last years at respective schools.

2010: “Danny, 13, is finishing at [...] a magnet [middle] school associated with math, science and technology. He [earned last year] a 4.0 [grade-point] average. He received a letter this past week from a magnet high school stating that he was the type of student they were looking for. [I, Dad, think Danny] is also in the National Junior Honor Society [service group]. [...] Danny continues to have to be at the school bus stop at 5:50 in the morning.”

2014: “Danny is the ultimate study robot, with his inhuman ability to study for hours on end in place of sleep, or other usual activities for high schoolers. He attended NV Boys State this past June, and he has risen to the rank of Division News Editor within [Kiwanis] Key Club--a HS service group. Danny and [his younger sister] also attended Key Club activities in CA in Nov. [...] As this is his senior year [...], he should be starting to apply for colleges now, but [...] he has not applied to Yale, which is causing his mother to feel that she is a ‘failure’ if none of her kids get accepted at this prestigious school--it’s used by Chinese mothers as a guilt trip for their kids! [...] He also received an AP with Honors award [from his magnet high school]. He presently is in the ‘top 10’ students in his class ranking. But if he doesn’t get his applications in, then there is always UNLV [Las Vegas]!”

2016: “Daniel is now a sophomore at UNR (Reno) in the Honors Program, and is an honors ambassador. He says he has 1 major in journalism with 3 minors at the present time, and he works at the library when time permits. He also completed an internship in publishing during the summer session, when he stayed in Reno and frugally survived during the summer by ‘couch surfing’ at several different locations. Several of us attended his confirmation at Easter in Reno. He also [...] presented at a few [conferences]. Additionally, he is involved in [the Kiwanis] Circle K service group on campus, as well as the Knights of Columbus, and he sings in the choir at the local Newman Center. Based on his Facebook postings, he seems to be enjoying college immensely. [...]”

I definitely loved service groups—and still do, if Peace Corps counts!

Seeing these letters in 2020, I feel amused how Dad wrote of my later academic interests with distance. Dad’s 2002 line about 5-year-old me, “[Daniel] studies very hard,” escalated exponentially, noticeable by his 2014 line about 17-year-old me, “Danny is the ultimate study robot, with his inhuman ability to study for hours on end in place of sleep.” I figure my peers were similar, though…

I feel amused, too, how Dad included Mom’s wanting me to pursue STEM careers. Chinese often expect this of their kids. In some sense, I’m glad Dad let me escape the Asian tendency and Mom’s ideal to have me pursue a Bachelor of Science. Back then, I contended a bachelor’s from the professional School of Journalism would still make me hireable.

Sure enough, Peace Corps hired!

Besides, I felt vindicated later when I learned my minors in English literature, Chinese studies and communication studies resembled my late mother’s fields of English literature and international relations... She clearly benefited from Liberal Arts. More on these in previous reflections, though. :)

Back From Mongolia

Snap back to March 2020, when I just returned to America after our COVID-19 evacuation from Mongolia.

I was really into “Frozen II,” the cathartic film easing me back into the States. My first week back felt very different from those after. Because “Some Things Never Change,” I discerned to do “The Next Right Thing.” Waking to various “Frozen II” numbers of looping in my brain, days began with such thoughts.

My first days, I often compared experiences to Mom’s when she raised my siblings and me. Despite being at home, I was alone. Dad worked away, plus siblings had school and work. (This preceded American schools canceling or moving online.) So, I felt confused what to do.

I discerned I could tidy the house, serve where others couldn’t. Whether dishes to wash or rooms to clean, I addressed what I saw. I imagined Mom felt this way when my siblings and I attended school and Dad worked.

I also considered my living father matters as much as my late mother. So, honoring Dad honors her, too.

Dad always had yard projects he wanted me doing. I had to weed so much when I first returned.

I felt insights, at least. I considered, weeds are eternal. Weeds will always grow on spiritual life. Weeds attempt to choke our crops’ life. We must uproot our weeds and prune dead areas to fortify new and better parts of being. The physical and spiritual are one. … Yet, weeds still annoy me.

Noticeably, my labors seemed to confuse many in my family. They seemed mostly to recall the 2015 me who’d choose studying over chores any day. But I guess most hadn’t factored I’ve experienced plenty in my years away from home, especially during my months living alone cooking for myself in Mongolia. House tasks are necessary parts of life.

Besides, I’d already been doing these tasks others seemed disinterested in, even back at Christmas 2019, when I sorted Mom’s books, and later during post-evacuation Week 9 (May 1-7), packing up Mom’s desk after three years gathering dust. I felt frustrated others seemed slow to accept I’ve changed since Peace Corps. I pray for grace.

The New Journey

June 6, 2020—just days after Pentecost and coincidentally one month to my 23rd birthday—marked one huge occasion.

Dad remarried!

I felt excited.

I also noticed a curious parallel in threes. For, on my family history adventures, I discovered something about Dad’s parents. In 1987, his mother's spouse passed away; on the third year, she married again, in 1990. 30 years later, my dad’s spouse passed away in 2017; on the third year, he married again, in 2020. Coincidences comfort me at times.

That day, I’d also finished revisions to submit my thesis to a different journal for publication. I’d tried before with one in June 2019 and February 2020, but unfortunately my work hadn’t fit within their scope. Still, the editor believed that I could publish it in the right place!

College Town Return

That Week 14 (June 5-11), Dad also purchased a house in Reno, Nev., where my kind stepmom may move, too. Dad requested aid moving things in Reno. My younger sister and youngest brother both opted out, so I went instead. I prefer Reno’s weather, anyway.

In Reno again, I felt parallels to past years.

Helping my youngest sister and her friend move from a condo and house to the new place, I recalled the many who helped me move between Reno homes during my undergrad. Honestly, I felt weird to think of my dad relocating to Reno, especially since I hadn’t known the area he chose existed during my years studying in town.

Mongolia returned to mind, too, while I lugged belongings in and out of the condo, up and down stairs. Hard to believe that that was three months ago when Peace Corps evacuated us. Exactly three months before, March 9, 2020, was my first Monday in Nevada again.

Writing of Mongolia, I also recalled every bellhop who's hauled my 23 kg (50 lbs.) luggage up stairs in Asia. God bless them.

On the bright side, with helping the sister and friend move, Dad said I got stronger. That felt good. When he asked how many push-ups I could do, I said 50—my new personal record met just days before. When I started working out the month and a half prior, I could only do half that.

Thanks to the lifting and yard work tasking me in Reno, I paused my fitness routines. I realized, I’ve enough strength and endurance for what I’d want to do. So now, having met the goals, I still work out, just less concerned about gains.

Tests of Faith

Back to that ‘groundskeeping.’

With Reno versus Vegas, I prefer hedges to palm trees. Hedges are more fun and less merciless. They leave my body less bloody than palm trees, too. Reno’s weather also keeps cooler.

As you’d expect, yard work leaves plenty time to reflect, chat with God. In earlier days these chats opened with lamentations about the heat and constant tasks. But God graces peace.

Ultimately, Dad’s tasks need someone to do them. He’s busy working full-time out-of-town, and siblings still have activities they must or would rather do. So I volunteer.

On the other side, Dad at times says he’ll compensate me once the bills are paid. There always seem bills to me, though. Since it’s been three months now, I try to think of this like the Kingdom. Whether or not I see rewards, I try to persevere. I must trust the Father to provide in time, no matter the wait. It’s a spiritual exercise.

Pa says he’s glad I’m financially stable, too—My scholarships, grants and work study graduated me debt-free. Those seem good, I guess.

So, spiritually exercising while laboring, I consider parables of workers in the field and masters. Christ spoke of such. Parables about fields and wages seem more nuanced after feeling comparable questions.

I think, too, to re-education labor camps sometimes. During China’s Cultural Revolution, my mom’s parents—both teachers—were sent to those. So, my ‘toiling’ in Dad’s backyards are surely nothing compared to what my grandparents involuntarily endured. I can bear my ‘shackles.’

These bring me to privilege.

At the day’s end, I have places to stay, food to eat and stable internet. Many Americans and people worldwide face greater turmoil than these, perhaps including you, my reader. So, I try acknowledging my ‘hardships’ hardly compare. I try to focus prayers for the needier. Faith helps me through.

On a happy note, I just reached the Diamond League on Duolingo! So, life could definitely be worse...

The Climb

One day during Week 15 (June 12-18), after Dad came home at dusk from work, he asked me to get out the ladder to climb the backyard tree. I thought that was wistful thinking!

Well, I had the time and realized he wanted me to climb after all. The tree had a fallen limb he wanted me to saw off, since I weigh less than him. I insisted I’d only climb with him around.

Well, he came around.

I ascended and sawed four limbs! Before the climb, we thought I only had to address a single one. But as I climbed for it, I found more. Thankfully, these were thin limbs. Dad gave some advice from below, handed me our hand saw then left me while he took care of other tasks around the yard. I climbed higher, wedged my feet in semi-stable positions and got to work.

Atop, the wind blew, so the tree rocked. I clung high in a swaying tree. Good Lord.

But I felt amazed, handling my saw even with my off-hand. I’d cling with one arm and saw with the other. When branches got stuck, I had to grab them, push and jerk them away from other sections to send them down. Dad had me call out, “Timber!” With the final branch out, I let the saw fall.

Success felt like redemption from that random tree I climbed the first culture-shocked day I returned to Vegas from Mongolia. This time I’d such control. My safety depended on it! Plus, I only grazed the back of my hand, as opposed to gashing my palm like the last time I left a tree. Less bleeding is better.

By the end, my arms and legs trembled, not from worry but from muscle fatigue. Still, I felt empowered. Throughout my childhood, I could never climb a tree. Now I passed the physical I hadn’t expected a month and a half prior.

All told, my climb took just half an hour.

Staying the Course

In a week and a half, I turn 23! So I’ll be one (1) 23-year-old, hehe. Look forward to new reflections on how I’ve grown and changed.

As an extension of my paternal family history projects, I started writing memorable quotes from Dad. My siblings and I wound up adapting these and more into our Fathers’ Day 2020 gift! Dad enjoyed our “Book of the Father” we printed.

Meanwhile, America begins to slightly reopen amid COVID-19 conditions, and the post-solstice summer’s begun. So, I encourage us to, whenever possible, still #StayHome more than usual, wear our face masks, maintain physical distance and of course wash our hands. We’ll get through this.

And I hear some are struggling with loneliness, too—If you need someone to talk to, you can always count on me. It’s among the most challenging feelings, given we humans are social beings staying physically apart. Writing, phoning and video calls help me, at least. Feel free to reach out. I keep you and loved ones in my prayers.

Best wishes, and till we chat again.

You can read more from me here at DanielLang.me :)

#Peace Corps #Mongolia #memoir #story #Catholic #God #memoryLang #USA #moving #Las Vegas #Pentecost #faith #Reno #Coronavirus #COVID-19 #hope #summer #StayHome #WithMe #Fathers Day

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eponymous-rose · 5 years ago

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The upside of all this recovering-from-surgery and moving-cross-country and starting-a-new-job stuff is that there’s so much happening that it’s just reached a level of equal ridiculousness, a plateau of absurdity, and my response to everything has become a shrugged “why not? it’s already going to be an absolutely bonkers few months anyway, might as well add something to the pile.”

I am making a list here both for my own benefit and for a little accountability:

Early August: Travel to Indianapolis for CR Live.

Also early August: Pack up apartment into a box and ship it away. Live on an air mattress for a couple weeks with paper plates? I’ll figure this step out later.

Mid-August: Finish up my job here and move across the country.

Late August: Unpack, buy furniture, set up job orientation stuff like confirming visa status for both international me and my international grad student, and also computer resources for both of us.

Early September: Work on a project that is funded independent of either my old job or my new one, because I’m not going to get another chance to work on it and it alone for a while.

Mid-September: Travel across the country to speak at a two-day workshop (and possibly a week-long conference before that?). Make a poster for it. My PhD institution actually contacted me and offered to pay all expenses on this one, which was really cool!

Also mid-September, two days after the workshop: Start my new job. Thank goodness there’s no teaching yet, but I will have a graduate student to start on the right track and I gotta constantly be applying for grants and prepping for when I do teach in January... and for when I develop a whole new course in the spring. Also, you know, do the actual job: research and publish papers and serve on committees and all that good stuff.

Late September: Just, you know, go to Bavaria. Give a talk there and hang around for a week-long workshop. This is being fully funded by a project my friend and I are doing, with travel money earmarked for international presentation of the results.

Sometime in October: Give a presentation to one of my funding agencies about the stuff I’ve been working on with a friend. Write ‘em a report by the end of the month.

Early November: Poland! Sure! Give a talk and put together a poster to present there for a week. (Again, funded by the international travel money.) I played around with the idea of taking some time off in here to travel around, but alas, it is to laugh. I’ll need to speed back home to get some more funding applications out there, because I’m now also responsible for my students’ salaries.

November: Speaking of students, this is the time where I recruit and hire (in January) at least one new graduate student. I should have some idea by then of where the money’s going to come from. No pressure.

Mid-December: Visit family for the holidays! Holy shit, this is no longer a massive undertaking and only costs as much as a week’s groceries instead of the $1500+ nightmare flights of the past. I can leave at a reasonable hour and still get there in time for a late breakfast. Also had A Talk with my folks about expectations and how it’s actually less stressful for me to be able to do at least some work over the holidays (and, for once, they actually are paying me enough for me to do that), and I think they’re cool with me disappearing to work most afternoons.

Early January: Travel across the country to present at and help run several conferences and symposia over a one-week period. I’ll be missing the first week of classes for this trip, which I’ll need to clear with the other instructor for the course, but if it doesn’t work out, I won’t exactly be heartbroken to have one less trip to take, and I’m setting things up to work without me if need be.

After that, so far (knock wood), I have nothing in the works until that summer, which is a void I set up on purpose so I can focus on being a really good instructor and advisor when students will need me most. Here’s hoping things stay clear.

It’s an absurd amount of stuff (believe it or not, I said no to a lot), but I feel like it’s still doable. I’ve gotta be smart about scheduling, but it’s infinitely less stressful than my previous move because so much is on rails this time around: job stuff, benefits, visa, housing, all that is (more or less) figured out, and I’m so relieved.

And if I make it out the other side with all of this done (or even 90% of it done), I’ll look pretty good to my department and be in a great position to connect my students with folks all over the world. My advisor did so much for my career, so I also want to make sure I can help my grad students get wherever they want to go; the more potential employers I know and can point them to, the easier that is.

Still very much convinced that this is all some weird mix-up and they’re going to let me go before I get tenure, but if that somehow happens, at least I’ll have given it a really good shot.

#eponymous academia tag #eponymous job tag

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s-n-arly · 5 years ago

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A Peek into the Indie Writer World – Part V: Presenting as a Professional

Also available on s-n-arly.com, should that prove a more viewer-friendly venue.

For the first article in this series, check out Part I. Or if you just missed the previous article, check out Part IV.

⁂

As an independently published writer, you are a professional and it’s in your interest (and in the interest of your fellow indie writers) that you present as a professional. We aren’t so far removed from the era where self-published authors were automatically dismissed as ‘not good enough for real publishing.’ While the majority of the population now recognizes indie authors as professionals, you’ll still encounter people who need to be convinced.

How do you get taken seriously? What can you do to ensure the image you’re broadcasting is professional?

The key places where your professionalism comes into play, in bullet format for those with very little time:

Website

Social Media

Live Networking

Book Covers

Book Content

The more specific details regarding those key places to put your professionalism in place:

Website

A website is a must, even if it’s minimalist. Other than finding your books on sites like Amazon, this is one of the top places people will look to see how legit you are (or appear to be). This can include potential customers, the media, library purchasing departments, and schools or conferences looking for speakers.

Spring for the domain registry

Makes you easier to find

Implies greater dedication to your writing career

The cost is often bundled in with website hosting services (make sure you own the domain, so you can switch services and take it with you)

Go with a theme and colors that will speak to your audience

Hire someone to set things up if you don’t have the skills to do it yourself

Include or incorporate high quality photos

Your own if you have them

If using others’ photos, have the proper permission and credit as required

Use open source or free stock photography sources, crediting as required

Keep it current and engaging

Minimal is okay

About page – information about you the writer, genre, areas of expertise, and anything that will help your audience relate to you

Publications – your publishing history and/or where to purchase your work

Contact page – can be as simple as an email link or a web form

Consider a built-in blog for dynamic content

Announcements, appearances and news

Release information

Teasers

Social Media

Blogs and social media can help you build up and engage with your audience. Make sure you’ve picked a platform that hits your target readers. You don’t have to spend hours every week on a blog or forum if that’s not your thing, just keep it relevant and regular. A mostly dead Tumblr or Twitter won’t do you any favors.

Ensure that your interactions and posts are professional.

Avoid over-sharing or inappropriate assumptions of intimacy

The internet is forever; consider whether your posts could come back to haunt you

Approach controversial material in a way that is consistent with or related to your writing philosophy or your work

Eg: My blog includes real world social and political issues that are reflected in my stories and my approach to world building

Be careful not to alienate your audience with content that has no bearing on your work

Do not bully others (yes there are writers who do this) and engaging in flame wars will likely reflect poorly

If you mess up, damage control involves a real apology and future caution

Present yourself in the way you want your fans to see you

Be friendly and open to interactions if you want fans to find you approachable

Be a bit aloof or distant, if you’re aiming for more space

Be cautiously prickly if that’s who you are, but keep in mind that being an asshole will only chase fans away

You should establish an email account specifically for your writing. This doesn’t have to run through your own domain if that doesn’t fit your budget. Select your email address carefully.

Easy to share and remember

Matches your author name or what you write

Doesn’t feel too casual unrelated to your writing work

Live Networking

Take advantage of the opportunities to network with readers and other writers in person. This can result in a valuable peer group, name recognition, and readership. While participating in these activities, you don’t need to wear a suit and schmooze like venture capitalist to present as a professional. Look up photos of these events and see what people tend to wear, and find something in your wardrobe that works and is comfortable for you.

Conventions – most genres have events where fans and creators get together

Volunteer and participate in programming you have an interest or expertise in

Attend the parties and meet people

Conferences – many genres have events for creators to discuss topics of interest and build their craft

Attend meet-ups or lunches

Readings – these can be held in bookstores, libraries, and at events like conventions and conferences

Prepare and practice your piece

You are in the limelight, be sure to shine

At any of these events, socialize with people you don’t know, even if that’s hard for you. You don’t need to meet everyone and you don’t have to try to impress people with exaggerations or lies. Just be yourself, unapologetically, and try to have interesting conversations. Listen at least as much as you talk, if not more. Swap contact information with people you may want to keep in touch with, and do follow up with them on social media.

Book Covers

Your book cover functions as your advertisement of the work; it sells the book. This is one of the places where a lot of indie authors make mistakes that result in an amateurish and unprofessional appearance. You can search online for “bad book covers” to get hundreds of examples of covers that have done more harm than good, and yes, some of them have been produced by big publishers.

If you don’t have the skills to design your covers, it’s in your interest to pay someone to do this. If you do have the skills to create your own covers, it’s still a good idea to run your drafts by a group of trusted individuals to identify any horrible mishaps you may have missed.

Book Content

The final piece of presenting yourself as a professional, is ensuring that your printed work meets the standards in the industry. This includes ensuring that you’ve told the best story you can, and that it is as free of spelling and grammatical errors as possible. It can be very helpful to get constructive feedback from fellow writers or beta readers, in case you’ve missed something. If editing isn’t your strong suit, paying a copy editor is not a bad idea.

In addition to the story itself, you also need to ensure your story looks good on the page, whether it’s digital or print. Pay attention to layout guidelines as these can influence whether the book looks professionally produced.

Margins – top, bottom and outside edges

Gutter – inside edges near the fold

Story title and author name in headings, often alternating

Page number in the footer

Printed work also needs properly set up front matter.

Title page, on a right page

Acknowledgments, on a right page

A blank left page, unless your acknowledgments run two pages (which should be avoided in fiction)

Table of contents (TOC), on a right page

First page of the story, on a right page (there may be a blank left page between the TOC and the story’s first page)

Front matter can determine whether your book meets requirements for wide distribution.

Most of your steps for presenting as a professional don’t have anything to do with your actual writing, and it may be easiest to think of it as the marketing side of the indie writer’s job. It’s often easier to start out with your level of caution and professionalism set a bit higher than you think you need, as it’s unlikely to offend anyone. As you get more comfortable with the various venues, you can assess and adjust if your default is too far in one direction or another.

⁂

Proceed to Part VI.

For more articles on writing, check out my Reflections From the Sol section.

#reflections from the sol #indie author #indie world #Professional #Indie Writer Series

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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Trump Impeachment Trial: Live Updates https://nyti.ms/3aBUBIT

Amazing that this trial is going to be decided by Senators who represent a minority of the country and from states that would look like third world countries if not for subsidies from the liberal states that the President and his party of Evangelical bigots despise.

"Every single senator who votes against hearing evidence and witnesses is voting against his or her oath of office to be faithful to the laws of the land. Each one should be impeached, following, by their constituency. This has nothing to do with the final outcome, but it is a kangaroo court if evidence and witnesses are not heard. Shameful mockery of our justice system and the Constitution. In what other trial would it be considered legal to block evidence and witnesses?"

CONCERNED MOTHER, NYC

Day in Impeachment: Key Moments From the Managers’ Opening Arguments

The House impeachment managers began laying out their case and Adam Schiff challenged the Senate to demand that the president provide the information he has blocked.

By Peter Baker and Eileen Sullivan | Published January 22, 2020 | New York Times | Posted January 23, 2020 |

[ DAY 2 IN THE SENATE: Follow our live coverage of the Senate impeachment trial.]

Here’s what you need to know:

Schiff called on the Senate to demand witnesses and documents so far denied by the Trump administration.

After a day of outlining the substance of the case against President Trump, the lead House impeachment manager returned in the evening session to lobbying the Senate for testimony and documents from the Trump administration, which so far has refused to provide them.

Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and head of the team of House managers, took the microphone for a second time after the dinner break and this time turned the question back on the Senate, challenging it to demand that the president provide the information he has until now blocked.

As he mentioned various moments in the effort by Mr. Trump and his team to pressure Ukraine to investigate his Democratic rivals, Mr. Schiff repeatedly stopped and pointed out that if the senators wanted to know more about what happened at that point, they could seek documents or witnesses who could provide more information.

“Would you like to see that written record?” Mr. Schiff said at one point about a key telephone call. “Well,” he added, “there’s a good way to find out what happened on that call because it’s in writing. Is there any question why they’re withholding this from Congress? Is there any question about that?”

The argument revived the pleas the managers made on Tuesday to no effect, as Republican senators rejected motions to call witnesses and seek documents at this time. The trial rules set by the Republican majority will allow the managers to make motions for witnesses and records after opening arguments and a question-and-answer session with senators.

The White House team, which had no speaking opportunity on the floor on Wednesday, has dismissed the managers’ demands for testimony and records, saying that it would violate traditional presidential confidentiality critical to a president’s ability to do his job and that if such information was so important to their case they should have gone to court to litigate the matter.

Managers accused Trump of using his power ‘to cheat’ in the election.

House managers began laying out their case for convicting and removing Mr. Trump from office, accusing him of a corrupt scheme to enlist the help of a foreign government to tarnish his domestic political rivals and pave his way to a second term.

In a series of sober, methodical speeches, the Democratic managers, or prosecutors, presented extracts of testimony that they were able to gather during the House inquiry despite the president’s refusal to cooperate to argue that Mr. Trump’s pressure on Ukraine to incriminate Democrats amounted to an assault on America’s constitutional democracy.

“President Trump solicited foreign interference in our democratic elections, abusing the power of his office to seek help from abroad to improve his re-election prospects at home,” Mr. Schiff said from the well of the Senate. “President Trump,” he added, “withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to a strategic partner at war with Russia to secure foreign help with his re-election. In other words, to cheat.”

While the Senate has so far refused to allow witnesses, Mr. Schiff and his fellow managers in effect brought a few to the floor anyway by playing video clips from current and former officials like Fiona Hill, Gordon D. Sondland, William B. Taylor Jr. and David Holmes, who testified before Mr. Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee last year. And they played several from Mr. Trump himself, showing the president in 2016 publicly calling on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email and last year publicly calling on Ukraine and even China to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Shocking video,” Representative Sylvia Garcia, Democrat of Texas, said after showing Mr. Trump telling George Stephanopoulos of ABC News last spring that he would still be willing to accept damaging information about a campaign opponent from Russia or another foreign government.

With three days to make their case, the seven House impeachment managers started outlining the events in narrative form, how the president and his associates sought to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations of Mr. Biden and Democrats while withholding $391 million in American aid. The managers will later explore the constitutional ramifications of the case.

Mr. Schiff was followed by Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York. Next came Ms. Garcia, then Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Val Demings of Florida and Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Mr. Schiff returned to the microphone after dinner, before handing off to Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, then returned to finish the day. Mr. Schiff was by far the main face of the effort, speaking for more than four hours compared with three hours for all six of his colleagues combined.

“If not remedied by his conviction in the Senate and removal from office,” Mr. Schiff said, “President Trump’s abuse of his office and obstruction of Congress will permanently alter the balance of power among the branches of government, inviting future presidents to operate as if they are also beyond the reach of accountability, congressional oversight and the law.”

Mr. Schiff went on to reject the notion that impeachment is outdated and therefore no longer a viable instrument to hold a president accountable. “If it is a relic,” he said, “I wonder how much longer our republic can succeed.”

[ TRUMP’S TRIAL, EXPLAINED: The trial could last two weeks, or stretch far longer.]

Trump set a new Twitter record as he lashed out at House managers seeking his removal from office.

The defendant was not in the room or even in the country, but he made his views known. Mr. Trump fired off so many Twitter messages as his fate was being debated on the Senate floor that he set a record for any single day in his presidency.

As of 7:30 p.m., he had posted or reposted 142 messages on Twitter, surpassing the previous record of 123 set in December, as he defended himself and lashed out at the House managers. Most of the messages were retweets of messages from allies and supporters assailing Mr. Schiff and others prosecuting the case.

Mr. Trump reposted a tweet from Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who wrote: “The more we hear from Adam Schiff, the more the GOP is getting unified against this partisan charade!” Mr. Trump added: “True!” He also reposted a tweet from Mr. Paul in which the senator invited the president to attend the trial as his guest.

Mr. Trump began his Twitter blitz around midnight Washington time while still in Davos, Switzerland, where he attended an economic forum. He fired off 41 tweets over the next hour, or one every 88 seconds, according to Bill Frischling of Factba.se, a service that compiles and analyzes data on Mr. Trump’s presidency.

Some of the messages later in the day came even as he flew on Air Force One back toward Washington and amplified the broadsides he delivered at a news conference before leaving Davos, where he called Mr. Nadler a “sleaze bag” and Mr. Schiff a “con job” and a “corrupt politician.”

Mr. Trump told reporters at the news conference that he would love to attend the trial — something that no other president has done and that his lawyers have advised against — so he could “sit right in the front row and stare into their corrupt faces.”

He praised his lawyers for their performance on Tuesday. “We’re doing very well,” he said. “I got to watch enough. I thought our team did a very good job. But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

The last comment about the material immediately provoked criticism from Democrats, who called it a boast about the president’s success at withholding documents and evidence from Congress. But it was unclear from the context whether he was instead saying, however inartfully, that his side had the stronger argument.

Schumer ruled out witness bargain that would call both Bolton and Hunter Biden to testify.

Senate Democrats ruled out any bargain that would involve calling Hunter Biden, the son of the former vice president, as a witness in the trial in exchange for Republicans agreeing to hear testimony from John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.

“That trade is not on the table,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters during a break in the trial.

Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company while his father was vice president. In a July phone call, Mr. Trump asked the president of Ukraine to do him “a favor” and investigate both Bidens, a request that is now at the heart of the impeachment charges.

The former vice president’s many allies in the Senate have been particularly insistent on the point. “The president is on trial here, not anyone with the last name Biden,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close ally of the elder Mr. Biden, said in a tweet Tuesday night. “VP Biden and Hunter Biden are not relevant witnesses.”

Senator Chris Coons ✔@ChrisCoons

I’m a lawyer, and here’s what I know: Trials have witnesses, and the witnesses have to be relevant to the case. It isn’t complicated.

The President is on trial here, not anyone with the last name Biden. VP Biden and Hunter Biden are not relevant witnesses.

10:45 PM - Jan 21, 2020

Joseph Biden himself also ruled out any testimony tradeoff, saying of the president, “I’m not going to play his game.”

“Look what Trump has done his whole career, whenever he’s in trouble,” Mr. Biden said during a campaign stop in Osage, Iowa. “He tries to blame somebody else, divert the attention.”

He added: “This is a constitutional issue. We’re not going to turn it into a farce, into some kind of political theater.”

Bound to silence on the floor, Trump’s lawyers and allies stewed with no chance to respond until later in the week.

While Mr. Trump used his telephone to make his views known, the next three days may prove uncomfortable for his lawyers and Republican allies stuck on the Senate floor as the House Democrats have exclusive access to the microphone.

Unlike the procedural arguments on Tuesday in which both sides went back and forth offering their points, the trial rules now provide the House managers with 24 hours over three days to make their case uninterrupted by the other side or any of the senators.

For hour after hour, the president’s lawyers and their Republican allies are being forced to sit silent in their seats, listening to the most nefarious interpretations of Mr. Trump’s actions without any ability to rebut the points except during breaks in front of television cameras in the hallways.

But it may also be the first time that some senators have heard the totality of the evidence presented in a sustained way. Always on the move, constantly running from one meeting to another, senators almost never have hours on end, much less three days straight, to focus on a single subject. Few if any of them are likely to have watched all of the House hearings that led to the impeachment.

The White House team will get its turn, though, and the House managers will be the ones having to sit quiet as the president’s lawyers present their case uninterrupted and unrebutted.

The White House ceded a chance to try to swiftly dismiss the case.

The White House passed up a chance to force a vote to dismiss the impeachment charges against Mr. Trump before arguments get underway.

Both the president’s defense lawyers and the House Democratic impeachment managers had until 9 a.m. to offer motions related to the trial, except for ones that would call for witnesses and new evidence, issues that will be dealt with next week. Neither side did so.

The White House’s silence was more significant. Although Republican leaders have discouraged the president’s team from seeking a swift dismissal, Mr. Trump had endorsed the idea and his conservative allies said the Senate ought to vote promptly to do so. A dismissal vote this week would almost certainly have failed to attract a majority of senators, dividing Republicans and dealing Mr. Trump an early symbolic defeat.

— Nicholas Fandos

Republicans bristled at House managers for their aggressive tone during the procedural debate.

On Tuesday, House managers repeatedly criticized the Republican senators who will decide Mr. Trump’s fate, with one manager accusing them of “treacherous” behavior. By Wednesday, it was clear that the tone did not go over very well.

Republicans laced into Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, whose aggressive tone toward senators — and accusation of treachery — during his remarks after midnight were too much for some in the chamber.

“What Chairman Nadler said and how he conducted himself was outrageous and an insult to the Senate,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “We don’t need to continue the clown circus that started over in the House.”

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, lashed out at the managers for suggesting that Republican senators were part of a cover-up by not voting in support of subpoenaing additional documents and witnesses. “You can say what you want about me but I’m covering up nothing,” Mr. Graham told reporters.

Even some Democrats offered some mild criticism. Senator Jon Tester of Montana told reporters that Mr. Nadler “could have chosen better words” and Mr. Coons told CNN that “frankly, several of those folks who were making arguments in the chamber took an aggressive tone. The tone in the Senate has always been and tries to remain measured and civil.”

All of which may explain why Mr. Schiff opened Wednesday’s presentation with an olive branch to the senators, heaping praise on them for their forbearance. “I want to begin today by thanking you for the conduct of the proceedings yesterday,” he told the senators. “And for inviting your patience as we go forward.”

— Michael D. Shear

BELOW ARE SOME READERS COMMENTS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY ABOUT TRUMP'S IMPEACHMENT TRIAL:

"Make no mistake, the foundational tenets of our Constitution and our republic is what is on trial here. As Schiff just stated the outcome will "... permantly alter the balance of power in our branches of government." And as Noah Bookbinder eloquently stated, "Mr. McConnell's rules will weaken the power of impeachment as a deterrent to presidential misbehavior..." With yesterdays rejection of all the amendments offered, the Republican dominated senate marched our country right up to the edge of this abyss. This is the kind of situation that can truly injure the guardrails of democracy – boundaries President Trump and his loyalists have been disassembling bit by bit with each lie, cruel and ignorant tweet, dismissal of Congressional authority, and outright attacks on the integrity of other governmental departments: DOJ, State Department, OMB, the Intelligence agencies, the Federal Judiciary, the EPA. Trump's corruption has metastasized through our government like a cancer. Trump and his officials have taken an ax to ethical standards of governing. This is how democracies die. The whole world is watching what America will do here. Will we step over into the abyss reduced to a pretense of a democratic republic like Putin's Russia? If a president is allowed to break the law, ignore the constitution, "do whatever I want" then the law is irrelevant and American constitutional democracy as we have known it is dead.

TWG, NEVADA

"Unlike other ridiculous debates in the Congress which have become increasingly more partisan, this one is of historical consequence. The debate whether Senators should allow thousands of consequential documents and key witnesses to be permitted in a trial is no less ridiculous, but history is noting this one. A real trial allows relevant witnesses regardless if it is damning to the defendant. In this trial the Republicans who share the same party as the President will not allow any evidence because it is disastrous. Let this go down as what it is. The Republicans in the Senate of the United States chose to ignore their sworn oath to the Constitution and chose to allow the President of the United States to run the impeachment trial his way. That is a sham trial. Much like they would hold in a corrupt third world government where democracy doesn't exist."JEANSCH, SPOKANE WA

"Words from Magistrate John Roberts :The president is on trial in the Senate, but the Senate is on trial in the eyes of the American people. Will you vote to allow all the relevant evidence to be presented here? Or will you betray your pledge to be an impartial jurors."

RICK JOHNSON, NYC

"Bolton can break the impeachment hearings wide open all by himself-- in the event he is not allowed to testify as a key witness by McConnell and the Senate GOP---by holding --or even threatening to hold--an immediate press conference and telling the truth to the American people about Trump's role in the Ukraine fiasco. The lid can't stay on forever. The truth is sure to emerge at some time in the near future --likely before the 2020 elections as more and more evidence of Trump's actions leak out and more and more voters get disgusted at Trump's actions and hold on the GOP--and the GOP will be blemished forever in American history if one of its own major party representatives does not have the honor and courage to voluntarily disclose to the American people what he himself knows at a critical time in its history. There is not a hero born every minute. Is Bolton a man or a mouse?"

KEN, WASHINGTON DC

"Schiff-does the Homework, His equations add up, Presents with Class, Head and Shoulders above embarrassing Trump Defense--Serves His Country well." THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID, WEST

"The Democrats have to repeat the truth over and over again, because the Republicans repeat their boring lies over and over again. The truth is never boring." ANNA, MA

"Schiff is the most gifted and wisest orator of our time. No need to yearn for statesmen long past gone. Just appreciate who stands before us."

MARK, VIRGINIA

"It appears as thought the GOP Senators have succeeded in pulling the wool over their own eyes. We see this for what it is: a cover up, a sham trial. They see it as their only choice- to follow the party line, to aid in the cover up, to do what they have to do to remain in their seats. Mitch McConnell will go down in history as orchastrating this and that will be his legacy."

WES, DENVER, CO

Keep in mind, the House managers are juggling multiple audiences. There are at least five target audiences for this presentation (not necessarily in order of priority): 1. The Senate/Congress 2. The President 3. The Judiciary 4. The American Public via the media-sphere 5. The Official Record Governance is a long arc. #4 and 5 get overlooked in our era of hyper-analysis. What enters the official record will be interpreted decades and centuries from now. Precedence is being set. History will not be kind to those who compromise the Constitution for expediency and short term political gain. The Senate has ceded Congressional power to the Executive since the middle of the 20th century. A rebalance of power is overdue. So, ask yourself, Who is risking the most and who has the most to gain in both terms? Will the Senate vote to make itself moot?”SOPHISTA, FL

"Watching the Senate impeachment trial proceedings and seeing how Republican Senators have made it clear that they have no interest in finding out the truth, let alone responding to it appropriately, I can't help but think that foreigners view the current US Senate as no different than a legislature in a dictatorship, which does nothing more than "rubber stamp" its approval of the dictator's decrees. And they wouldn't be wrong."JAY ORCHARD, MIAMI

"The "pleas from Republicans" were fabricated nonsense. Remember the "basement pizza party" where Republicans interrupted proceedings, bringing cell phones into a secure location, angry because they weren't given access? Except that they were. Several of them were on the very committees that were permitted to join, but they just didn't go. It was more important to them to make a scene and pretend that they were being barred. Half the people in this country don't even believe an impeachment trial should be transpiring? Well, that's interesting, considering the latest statistic I saw said 51% believe that not only should he have been impeached, but the impeachment *should result in removal* (note: This doesn't include the people who think he should be impeached but not removed). How can those two things be true at the same time? Most people believe that he will be acquitted. That's not the same thing as "not guilty"."FOREST HILLS, IL

" 'What are [Republicans] afraid of? They're going to hear evidence that they don't like? They must be afraid of something,' Conway told Tapper, referring to Republicans' refusals on witnesses and evidence. 'And that's the thing that I find most disturbing about it, is they don't want to hear the evidence because they know the truth. They know he's guilty. And they don't want to hear the evidence because they don't want the American people to see it too.' " (Conservative Lawyer George Conway, CNN, 22Jan2020)" STEVE KENNEDY, DEER PARK, TX

"Nearly two years ago I had an exchange of messages with Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s chief legal analyst, about the likely outcome of the Mueller investigation. He thought it would be Trump’s Waterloo, and I wrote that I thought Trump would pull off “the perfect crime”: everybody knows he is guilty, but a completely dysfunctional Congress (and a powerful propaganda machine - Fox News) would ensure that he never pays for his crimes. All of that was before the “Ukraine Shakedown”. Now, a GOP-controlled Senate, unbound by any quaint notions of ethics or service to country, will likely let Trump get away with this latest outrage. He will go free, and I’ll wager that the first thing Trump will do is call up Vladimir Putin and start working on the disruption of the 2020 election." WILLIAM L. VALENTI, PORTLAND, OR

"The speech of Schiff's lifetime. Clear, measured, rational and dignified. I am glad he is speaking to the American public. No matter what the Senate Republicans do, we will have the timeline of Trump's corruption and an understanding of its repercussions."

SUE, ASHLAND OR

PLEASE share your 💭 thoughts on the Trump Impeachment trial so far!!!

*********

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justarachthing · 6 years ago

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Week 5: Digital Citizenship 1: Political Engagement

Social media has been influencing the political landscape. The era of social media allows politicians to use various social media platforms to campaign and communicate to a large audience.

youtube

Politicians use social media to reach out to their audience for a variety of reasons.

According to Aishat, Norsiah & Mohd (2017), social media encouraged youths to participate and it also allows politicians to get the message to their voters more easily. This has led political campaigns to publish ads and commercials for free on YouTube; allowing them to get the message through at zero cost. Moreover, viewers can share campaign material or news to one another easily which could go viral. Finally, by using social media, political campaigns can analyse viewer’s information as a way of connecting with the audience (Murse 2019).

However, a downside of using social media in politics is that there are many fake news that seem to be real and often, many people believe them (Hull 2017).

youtube

During the GE14 election in Malaysia, social media encouraged many young voters to participate and be updated. It also allowed people to learn about the activities of both political parties. Furthermore, hashtags like #PulangMengundi encouraged people to return home to vote, and platforms like Facebook and Youtube allowed Malaysians from around the world to view the rallies (Lim 2018). My relatives abroad have actively used social media to check up on the latest election news.

Political memes

Social media has made it easier for people to create political memes. Memes trigger reactions from people and are a new genre of political communication (Tenove 2019). According to Gubbay (2018), memes attract the younger generation to be involved in politics and politicians have even started to create their own memes to target younger audiences. However, these memes could create cynicism and increase mistrust in government.

(an example of a meme of Malaysian politics)

Social movements in politics

Social movements matter as they can influence politics; however this can differ depending on how democratic a state is. According to Amenta et.al. (2010), the main potential political consequences of movements are the extension of democratic rights and practices and the formation of new political parties. On the other hand, there are some countries like Turkey with authoritarian regimes which led to protests like the Gezi Park protests’ where protestors got shot (Letsch 2014).

Hence, for countries exercising freedom of speech in their democracy; social movements could be a part of politics, and in some countries, not. In my opinion, there has to be a balance in the politicization of social movements. While some movements could expose flaws in the political system, some movements could cause their own problems. For example, movements should be politicized if it exposes the flaws of the political systems and benefits the nation as a whole. The Arab Springs movement presented the dictatorship, unemployment and corruption across the Middle East (Social movements that have changed the world 2014).

On the other hand, there are arguments that movements like #MeToo have been politically hijacked and weaponized until the point where it’s dividing both genders making it a weak political strategy (Sheffield 2018).

youtube

(video: #MeToo causing complications at workplace)

:･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧ :･ﾟ☆✧

References

Aishat Adebisi, A, Norsiah, BAH & Mohd Sohbi, BI 2017, ‘Cognitive engagement and online political participation on social media among youths in malaysia: the moderating role of political knowledge’, SHS Web of Conferences, vol. 33, no. 85, p. 1.

Amenta, E, Caren, N, Chiarello, E & Su, Y 2010, ‘The political consequences of social movements’, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 36, no. 287-307.

Chu, MM 2018, ‘With a serious election, comes the lighter side of Malaysians’, The Star, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2018/04/13/with-a-serious-election-comes-the-lighter-side-of-msians/>

Gubbay, M 2018, ‘The rise of political memes could have a major effect on America’, Teen Vogue, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-rise-of-political-memes-could-have-a-major-effect-on-america>

Jericho, G 2012, The rise of the fifth estate: social media and blogging in australia politics, Scribe Publications, Carlton North.

Hull, G 2017, ‘Why social media may not be so good for democracy’, The Conversation, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://theconversation.com/why-social-media-may-not-be-so-good-for-democracy-86285>

Kimmel, L 2018, ‘Is #metoo worsening the divide between men and women’, The Globe and Mail, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-is-metoo-worsening-the-divide-between-men-and-women/>

Letsch, C 2014, ‘A year after the protests, gezi park nurtures the seeds of a new turkey’, The Guardian, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/29/gezi-park-year-after-protests-seeds-new-turkey>

Lim, D 2018, ‘Social media and politics in Malaysia election’, YourCommonwealth, viewed 1 April 2019, <http://www.yourcommonwealth.org/social-development/democracy-participation/social-media-and-politics-in-malaysia-election/>

Murse, T 2019, ‘How social media changed politics’, ThoughtCo, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.thoughtco.com/how-social-media-has-changed-politics-3367534>

Sheffield, C 2018, ‘Democrats have hijacked #metoo for political gain’, CNN, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/26/opinions/democrats-have-hijacked-metoo-for-political-gain-sheffield/index.html>

Social movements that changed the world, 2014, Social movements that changed the world, MSN, viewed 1 April 2019, <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/bing/social-movements-that-changed-the-world/ss-BBfPrnS#image=2>

#mda20009 #week5

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britesparc · 5 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #380

Top Ten Favourite Moments at E3 2019

I have to concede it was a slightly disappointing year. Maybe I was just too excited and had set unrealistic expectations. But most of the big games were already announced, and Microsoft didn’t really say anything we didn’t know regarding their next console. But there were at least one or two really cool moments – one of which is probably going to be held up as one of the big E3 moments of the modern age. And so, with no further ado, here’s my list of favourite E3 moments. Nowt much to add, let’s get onto the list!

Keanu! Yeah, this is it. At the end of a pretty but very grim trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 (which, sadly, seemed to be a cutscene that failed to show anything about how the game played), all of a sudden a character appears talking to the player, and it’s only bloody Keanu Reeves. Then the doors parted, smoke billowed, and he is come among us. “You’re breathtaking!” someone shouted (less weird than it sounds in context). He was suitably hyped, seemed to have a vague idea of what he was talking about, and really just cemented his position as the grooviest, coolest, nicest guy in showbiz. It was during the Microsoft conference, and managed to steal all the thunder from Microsoft’s other reveals before they had time to make them; arguably, it even stole all the thunder from Cyberpunk, too. Who cares about violent Blade Runner homages when here’s Ted Theodore Logan to tell us that we’re breathtaking, too?

Game Pass Ultimate! I love Game Pass. I think it’s a really good deal. I also think it’s not really for me, not in the medium term; I have too big a backlog of bought games, not enough time, and, frankly, not enough money. I get my Gold and that’ll do for now. But Ultimate, which rolls in Game Pass for both PC and console, as well as Gold, sounds like it’s probably the future (especially once they roll in xCloud too). But really this is here just because they did the best deal I think I’ve ever seen in gaming. Try Game Pass Ultimate for £1, they said; cool, I said, gives me an opportunity to check out Void Bastards and get back on Crackdown 3. What they didn’t say is that, for £1, they convert your existing Xbox Live Gold to Game Pass Ultimate for the duration of your subscription; in my case, next May. So – having already paid for Gold – I’ve now essentially got eleven months of games for £1. £1. That’s crazy. Thank you, Microsoft.

Star Wars! They’d sorta shown Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order before E3, but the extended gameplay that they demoed during both the E3 presentation and the MS one has made me quite excited. I like both Titanfall games so I’m already fond of Respawn, and I’m a long-standing fan of Star Wars games. I’ve seen some sniffing at this, but I think it looks terrific; sufficiently like Jedi Knight (or, more specifically, Jedi Knight II and Jedi Academy) to whet my appetite. It looks more fun than Force Awakens; faster, frothier, brighter, and with better combat. In short: I have a good feeling about this

LEGO Star Wars! In a way, even more exciting, even if I’ve already played a LEGO version of two-thirds of this game. But my understanding is that this is all-new, a journey through nine films retold through the medium of LEGO. My near-religious adoration of LEGO games, plus Star Wars, plus the fact that LEGO Star Wars was the game that started this crazy franchise in the first place, means this will be a must-have next year.

Animal Crossing! I guess we all knew it was coming but it was simply delightful to see: the Switch version of Animal Crossing. Not being a fundamentalist Nintendo fan, I’ve not played a Crossing since the DS, but I am a big fan of the games (I remember insisting one December 31st that I ring in the New Year with my DS open, just to see what it was like over partying with the Animals). The new one looks gorgeous; beautiful, cute visuals, a really nice semi-tropical setting, little touches that I can imagine will just make day-to-day gameplay more appealing, and some great multiplayer options. I know everyone else is disappointed that it’s been pushed back slightly to next Spring, but that fits in better with other games I’ve got to play (including Fallen Order at Christmas) so job’s a guddun as far as I’m concerned. Roll on 2020.

Zeldas! Plural! I never had a Gameboy (or a NES, or a SNES; technically I never had an N64 or a GameCube either, although I did live with people who had them at the time); I never played the original Link’s Awakening. Everyone goes on and on about it but it holds precisely zero emotional attachment for me. But I do like Zelda games; even if I’ve never spent a phenomenally long time with any of them, really, I do like them, and I’d love to really sink my teeth into Breath of the Wild. The art style of the Awakening remake is phenomenal; it doesn’t look like it’s revolutionising the gameplay but it’s simply beautiful to behold. And then at the end, a darker-tinged Breath sequel? Even I find that exciting, and I’ve barely played Breath as it is. I suppose one of the true game announcement surprises this E3.

Watch Dogs! Yes, I know! I’ve never played a Watch Dog. They look a bit generic, if I’m honest. And dense. Another big open-world game for me to sink time I have into. The new one being set in London is quite nice, although prospect of playing a post-Brexit London just feels depressing, if I’m honest. However! The video they showed looked really good fun. True, the London they showed did not look recognisably London-ish, but the gameplay looked crazy. Helen, the geriatric assassin, flopping over barriers and tasering people? Yes please. More ninja grannies in games. And the lady who fought like John Wick, kung fu-ing mofos before shooting them once in the head? Incredible. I want an entire game of that. Will I get Watch Dogs Legion? Probably not. But I’d like to play it.

Scarlett! I know, I know. It’s not what I predicted, and not what I wanted. But when I think about it, I was being a bit unrealistic. I suspected, based on what I know about the industry and what I read about available technology, that in al likelihood the next Xbox console would be coming out Christmas 2020. So how much were they likely to show eighteen months prior? No name, no box, no price. Figures. So in that respect, I guess it was disappointing, but it was really nice to hear them talk about the future of Xbox. It’s interesting that, from what we know so far, it appears identical to the PS5. but, really, it’s the confidence of Microsoft in the future of the brand and the consoles we’ll play in years to come that’s reassuring. Bit bummed out that Nintendo didn’t offer any new hardware either, mind.

Double Fine! Microsoft’s rampant acquisition of companies continues apace, which reassures me when approaching a new console generation. It’s still too early, really, to see the fruits of these developer purchases: incoming games from the likes of Ninja Theory will have been well underway before they saw juicy MS dollars. Buying Double Fine is a surprise, and a welcome one for me; I’ve been delighted by so much of their output (Brutal Legend, Costume Quest, underrated puzzle game Scurvy Scallywags); and I’ve loved Tim Schafer since his LucasArts days. It was Schafer’s hilarious onstage appearance that most appealed though: claiming he’d do anything MS asked, “Halo stuff, Forza stuff”. A self-deprecating wit so rarely seen on an E3 stage.

Devlolver Em-Effing Direct! The Devolver Digital “press conferences” are a witty riposte to the earnestness of E3. Foul-mouthed, hyper-violent spectacles that lampoon sacred cows of the videogame industry and dare to ask questions of the way in which things are done – as well as actually announce cool new stuff – they serve as an amusing if throat-stinging chaser after days of corporate doublespeak. This year they turned their bloodshot gaze onto “Direct” videos; apt given the number of big publishers who eschewed a showfloor presence in favour of a tailored YouTube stream. A steady flow of deep-cut RoboCop references was the order of the day, along with some surprisingly dense continuity and another cliffhanger ending. Can’t we do these more than once a year?

There we are; not necessarily a banner year, given that it was the last gasp of a fading generation. But plenty to like and a few surprises. I guess it’s a bit weird that it’s not really the news of individual games that I will be taking away from E3 2019; rather, it’s moments and services and promises of the future.

So was I right about any of my ridiculous predictions? Well, a bit. Microsoft and Nintendo didn’t divulge any concrete details on their consoles; nor did Ninty really pull a classic out of their hat. But there was a second Star Wars game alongside Fallen Order (LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga); there will be “xCloud shenanigans” this autumn, if not quite in the way I predicted; there was a “Big game on Switch”, but it was The Witcher 3; no “Minecraft 2” but there was Minecraft Dungeon. Most of the other predictions didn’t really happen, however. I nearly suggested something big would end up an Epic Store exclusive, but I was trying to be positive, and I didn’t really want that to happen; lo and behold, here comes Shenmue 3. So – considering it was more of a wishlist than a realistic prophecy – I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.

#top ten #e3 #e3 2019 #microsoft #nintendo #keanu reeves #games #gaming #devolver digital #double fine #project scarlett

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dionnecox0576-blog · 6 years ago

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olko71 · 3 years ago

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New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2021/09/facebook-to-halt-work-on-instagram-kids-version

Facebook to Halt Work on Instagram Kids Version

Facebook Inc. FB 0.18% said it would suspend plans for a version of its Instagram app tailored to children, a concession after lawmakers and others voiced concerns about the photo-sharing platform’s effects on young people’s mental health.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said Monday that the social-media service is pausing its work so that it can listen to concerns and do more to demonstrate the value of the kids version, which was to be ad-free and allow parents to monitor children’s activity.

“I still firmly believe that it’s a good thing to build a version of Instagram that’s safe for tweens, but we want to take the time to talk to parents and researchers and safety experts and get to more consensus about how to move forward,” Mr. Mosseri said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Facebook’s move follows an article this month in The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series showing that the company’s internal research found Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of young users, particularly teenage girls with body-image concerns. The article prompted a Senate hearing on the subject scheduled for later this week.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from a 2019 internal presentation, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

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Separately on Monday, Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis directed his secretary of state to investigate Facebook in relation to another article in the Journal’s series. That article exposed a company system known as “cross check” that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of Facebook’s rules for behavior on its platforms. Mr. DeSantis said the probe would examine whether the exemptions violate Florida election laws.

Asked for comment, a Facebook spokesman reiterated that the cross check system was designed to help the company accurately enforce policies on content potentially requiring more understanding. He said Facebook has been working to address the issues with the program to improve how it operates.

The Journal’s Instagram article added to concerns about the platform’s effects on young people. Facebook’s plan for a children’s version of the app, which Mr. Mosseri said was intended for 10-to-12-year-olds, has drawn criticism this year from federal lawmakers and state officials over its impact on young people’s mental health. Instagram bars children younger than 13 from its platform but acknowledges that many join anyway.

In May, attorneys general from 44 states and territories urged Facebook to abandon plans for a children’s Instagram platform, arguing that children aren’t equipped to use social media and that there are better ways for them to connect with friends and family. Members of Congress from both parties have also expressed concerns about the plan.

“Facebook is heeding our calls to stop plowing ahead with plans to launch a version of Instagram for kids,” Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) said on Twitter Monday. “But a ‘pause’ is insufficient. Facebook must completely abandon this project.” Rep. Ken Buck (R., Colo.) also called on Instagram to “abolish the program completely.”

In an interview Monday, two of the state officials who criticized Instagram’s plan in the spring, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson, also called on Instagram to fully abandon the project.

Facebook executives say that because children already find ways to skirt the app’s age restrictions, it would be better for them to use a version with stronger safety controls. Mr. Mosseri noted Monday that other big internet platforms such as YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, and TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd., have versions designed for children under 13.

The company believes the children’s version “is the right thing to do,” Mr. Mosseri said in a statement. “Critics of ‘Instagram Kids’ will see this as an acknowledgment that the project is a bad idea. That’s not the case.”

Mr. Mosseri and Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg have said that social media can help children form connections.

Instagram also plans to offer more parental controls to families with older children, Mr. Mosseri said. The controls would be optional and would allow parents to monitor and shape their teenagers’ experience with the platform. Instagram had been developing some of those tools for the now-paused kids’ platform, he said.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said that social media can help children form connections.

Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

“Parents of kids of all ages are looking for more ways to supervise and control their kids’ experiences online,” Mr. Mosseri said. The controls could give parents the ability to approve whom their teenage children can message and follow, he added.

The Journal’s Sept. 14 article about Facebook’s internal research on Instagram was part of a series showing that Facebook knows its platforms are riddled with a variety of flaws that cause harm. In addition to the Instagram research, the Facebook Files articles—based on a review of internal documents and interviews with current and former employees—also reported on problems with Facebook’s content-moderation policy for high-profile accounts, its efforts to tame angry content and its programs to bar criminals such as human traffickers and drug cartels.

Josh Golin, executive director of a group called Fairplay that advocates reducing companies’ interactions with children, praised Instagram’s decision and said it was evidence of rising concerns about the platform’s harms.

“What you saw here was a really well-organized outcry from so many different circles: experts, advocates, states’ attorneys general, parents,” Mr. Golin said. “That, combined with the really disturbing revelations in The Wall Street Journal, created so much pressure on Facebook that they understood that they really risked drawing the ire of lawmakers and doing long-term damage to their brand.”

Leaders of the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer-protection subcommittee said last week they would hold a hearing this Thursday to question a senior Facebook executive about its platforms’ effects on young people’s mental health.

On Monday, Facebook said it would make public the internal Instagram research that was the subject of the Journal’s reporting.

“Of course people should judge for themselves, so we’re just making sure that all the Ts are crossed and the Is are dotted so that we can release it both to Congress and then to the public in the next few days,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, said at a conference hosted by the Atlantic magazine.

Facebook’s head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury, said in a blog post Sunday, 12 days after the Journal’s article ran, that the Journal’s reporting mischaracterized the company’s findings about Instagram and teens. Ms. Raychoudhury said that body image was the only area, out of a dozen, where the company found teen girls who reported struggling with the issue said that Instagram made it worse. Facebook’s research shows many teens “feel that using Instagram helps them when they are struggling with the kinds of hard moments and issues teenagers have always faced,” she said.

A Journal spokesman said, “We stand behind The Facebook Files. None of the company’s defenses have cited a single factual error—and in keeping with our standards, we gave Facebook ample time and space to comment before publication.”

The Journal’s article noted that for most teenagers, Instagram’s effects can be manageable and at times positive but highlighted those areas where the company’s own researchers flagged negative effects on at-risk users.

The Facebook Files

Write to Matt Grossman at [email protected]

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Why Are Republicans Against The Era

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-are-republicans-against-the-era/

Why Are Republicans Against The Era

Republican Governors Revolt Against Cdc Mask Guidance

Bill Maher explains why intelligent people vote Republican

Republican governors are rejecting new mask recommendations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued Tuesday, casting the health guidance as a step back amid a push to vaccinate millions of Americans that is already struggling in their states.

In statements and public comments, governors said their states would not return to the mask orders issued in 2020.

“The CDC’s new guidance suggesting that vaccinated people wear masks indoors flies in the face of the public health goals that should guide the agency’s decision making,” Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts said in a statement. “The State of Nebraska will not be adopting their mask guidance.”

“Public health officials in Arizona and across the country have made it clear that the best protection against COVID-19 is the vaccine. Today’s announcement by the CDC will unfortunately only diminish confidence in the vaccine and create more challenges for public health officials – people who have worked tirelessly to increase vaccination rates,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement.

Newly revised guidance from the Atlanta-based agency recommends that some fully vaccinated people wear masks indoors if they live in areas where the virus is spreading rapidly.

Most of Nevada, Utah and Wyoming are areas of high concern. So are parts of California, much of Indiana and Kentucky, and eastern swaths of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Video: CDC Reverses Mask Guidelines

CNBC

President Truman Integrates The Troops: 1948

Fast forward about sixty shitty years. Black people are still living in segregation under Jim Crow. Nonetheless, African Americans agree to serve in World War II.

At wars end, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, used an Executive Order to integrate the troops.

These racist Southern Democrats got so mad that their chief goblin, Senator Strom Thurmond, decided to run for President against Truman. They called themselves the Dixiecrats.

Of course, he lost. Thurmond remained a Democrat until 1964. He continued to oppose civil rights as a Democrat. He gave the longest filibuster in Senate history speaking for 24 hours against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.

House Votes To Reauthorize Violence Against Women Act Despite Gop Opposition

WASHINGTON The House on Thursday passed an extension of the Violence Against Women Act, which provides protections for survivors of domestic violence, and includes new gun-related provisions that are opposed by the NRA.

Lawmakers approved the bill in a 263-158 vote, with most Republicans voting against it.

The measure, which expired in February, was sponsored by Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa. The bill today, which would extend the law for five years, includes new provisions that would make it harder for domestic abusers to gain access to guns.

Those include an attempt to close the so-called ‘boyfriend’ loophole, prohibiting those convicted of stalking or abusing individuals with whom they have been in a relationship that did not include marriage from buying a gun.