ASJA PACIFIC NORTHWEST NEWSLETTER
For ASJA members in
Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Oregon and Washington
November 2024
https://asjapnw.org
In This Issue
From the Prez, It’s Our Move, M. Carolyn Miller, ASJA PNW President
So You Want to Write a Memoir, Rosemary Keevil
Enhance Your Conference Note-Taking, Bruce Miller
Member News and Announcements
Our November chapter meeting at 11 am:
M. Carolyn Miller is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Social Media Marketing
Time: Wednesday, November 20, 2024 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87898612924
Meeting ID: 878 9861 2924
***Please bring your ideas for how to celebrate the upcoming holiday, remotely and/or in person, to the November meeting!***
This newsletter publishes the first day of each month and welcomes article submissions and photos. Please email the ASJA PNW Newsletter Editor, Maxine Cass, at maxinecass@gmail.com .
From the President
by M. Carolyn Miller
ASJA PNW Chapter President
It’s Our Move
On the eve of the U.S. presidential election, as a narrative game designer, I pay little attention to the tale each candidate is telling about the next chapter of our nation’s story. I know to look below the storyline to the underlying design options that fuel their stories: autocracy or democracy. Lucky for us, investigative journalists have outlined what to expect from each choice.
Russian-American journalist and author Masha Geesen outlined the design of an autocracy in Surviving Autocracy. Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, did the same for the design of our current democracy.
An autocratic design demands total allegiance to the man at the top, similar to a CEO, noted Geesen. Corruption is integral to the design and all who partake in it are complicit. Government funds are to be used for personal gain. Repeat the stories long enough until they are believed. And finally, build moats, physical and metaphoric, around classes of people, limit services to them, and erode the humanity that connects us all.
The second design option is our current democracy. As Wilkerson noted that design is echoed in the U.S., Hitler’s Third Reich and India’s caste system. Strategically and systemically developed, these design principles include a “social, economic and psychological template” that ignores our innate abilities and instead assigns us (caste) roles. We are “color-coded” and that coding is then institutionalized.
Neither design option is equitable, but for one critical design difference: who holds the power. In an autocracy, the man at the top holds the power, noted Geesen. In a democracy, the voters hold the power. That’s us—you and me—despite how we might want to blame others for our collective malaise.
Democracy is not perfect. But it’s the best we’ve got right now and it is ever-evolving. And thanks to journalists like Geesen and Wilkerson, we can be informed co-designers in our nation’s next chapter.
It’s our move.
M. Carolyn Miller, MA, spent her career designing narrative- and game-based learning. Today, she consults and writes about narrative in our lives and world, the inextricable link between the two, and the critical role of self-awareness in transforming both. www.cultureshape.com
Story by and photos courtesy of Rosemary Keevil
So You Want to Write a Memoir
I jumped at the opportunity to be on a panel of memoirists at a Vancouver literary festival. It was finally an opportunity for an in-person author event for my memoir, The Art of Losing It: A Memoir of Grief and Addiction.
“In-person” is the operative term here because my book was published on October 6, 2020. COVID hit earlier that year and by the Fall we were in full lockdown. That meant there was no way I would be having an in-person launch, book tour or even book signings.
As it turned out, my virtual book launch was the same night as one of the Biden-Trump US presidential debates: Thursday, October 22. The debate was scheduled for 6:00 p.m. and my one-hour launch was scheduled for 5:00. I figure this augured well for me, as people might be near their screens prepping for the debate. They could tune into me while waiting for the big-ticket item.
I considered my launch a success, but I felt ripped off that I wasn’t able to partake in any in-person author events. I finally had that chance this year on Saturday, September 28, at Word Vancouver, Western Canada’s largest free literary festival. There were several online gatherings in the week before the main event at Robson Square in downtown Vancouver. There were about 30 sessions and dozens of exhibitors.
I am a member of the Canadian Authors Association and the BC Branch was hosting a session called So You Want to Write a Memoir. The three authors on the panel were asked to talk about how we wrote our memoirs and how we got them published.
The other two panelists were Patrick McLaren and Franke James. Patrick is the author of Magic Travels: The Unlikely Adventures of a Geologist. Patrick is a geologist, as well as a magician, with a wild life story, which includes packing his magic bag of tricks wherever he goes. Franke is a climate activist and the author of Freeing Theresa: A True Story About My Sister and Me, a memoir focused on the rights of those with disabilities. We were an eclectic threesome.
I was first up and started by briefly telling my story: I had tragedy befall me as a young mother in the early 1990s, when my husband died of cancer and my brother died of AIDS. I became an alcoholic and an addict and then, in 2002, got clean and sober.
I included three one-minute readings from my book.
I explained to the audience of about two dozen people that I decided to write my memoir in hope that it might serve as a resource for other folks finding themselves in similar situations. And indeed, it has done just that.
I continued on about my treasure trove of resources to draw on to write my book: my personal diary; my husband’s diary; copious medical records; and AA (Alcohols Anonymous) 12-step notebooks, which documented the wreckage of my (drunk and addicted) past.
I did have suggestions for people who do not have that kind of treasure trove of resources: interview family, friends, neighbours and colleagues; dig up photos–yours and other’s; and do memory triggering exercises. There are actually memory-triggering writing workshops.
Then I offered information on the actual writing of the manuscript and getting it published. I hired a dynamo editor and manuscript consultant, Brooke Warner, who is based in Berkeley, California. I was given deadlines: one chapter on the first of every month.
Brooke also happens to be the publisher of She Writes Press, the publisher of my memoir. SWP is a hybrid press, which means your manuscript needs to qualify and then you pay for their professional services, which include: traditional distribution by Simon & Schuster; proofreading of the final manuscript; copyright filing in the US; warehousing books; support for getting books into bookstores, libraries, and other trade outlets; custom cover and interior design; and e-book file conversion. Today, the She Writes Press Publishing Package costs US$10,000.
I received positive feedback on my presentation both from the audience and my fellow presenters. Franke James wrote a piece on the So You Want to Write a Memoir session for the Canada Author Association newsletter. She wrote, “Rosemary Keevil, author of The Art of Losing It, was authentic, engaging, and surprisingly funny, given her book’s topics (grief and addiction).”
Rosemary Keevil is a freelance journalist and the author of The Art of Losing It: A Memoir of Grief and Addiction. She has been a TV news reporter, a current affairs radio show host and managing editor of a professional women’s magazine. She was a can-can dancer in Dawson City, Yukon, and drives a mean motorboat. Rosemary lives in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada, with her partner and two doodles.
by Bruce Miller
Enhance Your Conference Note-Taking
On Saturday, December 11, 1971, the Society of Magazine Writers (SMW) – now the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA) – held a Non-Fiction Writers Workshop. This event sparked the continuing long run of annual conferences by SMW and ASJA. The Workshop was held at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which was the co-sponsor. A detailed report on the Workshop followed in an SMW newsletter. There were about 240 paid registrants at the event, which had the following session topics:
–What It Takes To Be A Good Writer
–Getting Words On Paper
–The Advantages and Disadvantages of Specialization
–How to Sell What You Write
The follow-up report also stated that “We have complete tapes of the Workshop”
What has happened to those recordings?
As with many events, recordings may be available – for a while. This is why years ago I started to create my own archive for personal use of events I have legitimately attended.
In the days before a lot of electronics and computers, the best archives were your own notes, usually hand-written. Nowadays you can enhance note taking for your personal archives. And because many events are now virtual events, there are many possibilities for enhanced note-taking.
Consider a recent virtual video conference I paid to attend. For my personal use only, I recorded locally the sessions I attended live. I then recorded locally all the sessions I had legitimate access to for playback – again for personal use – while they were still available.
I then ran each video through a transcription tool to create a text-based version of notes. This allows me to search the various resulting files by key word.
WARNING: Be sure the original content and resulting transcripts are not made available to the public directly or indirectly. This is why a paid service is often the better option.
The transcription service also created a summary for each session.
The transcripts could now be submitted to an AI (Artificial Intelligence) tool for further analysis. WARNING: When submitting such material to an AI tool, one must be sure that the tool does NOT incorporate the content into its pool for training.
Many video sessions these days include a concurrent chat window where attendees leave notes and frequently, useful URLs. Plucking the URLs out can be a tedious task, so AI can help. In my case, I had the text of each chat in a separate file. I asked an AI service to create a Windows script to extract the URLs from each file and create the list of URLs by filename so I would know which file (hence, session) the URLs were from. By asking for a Windows script that runs locally, I could be sure the source content and the resulting content would not be distributed and would remain as my own personal notes.
The result of all this effort is a greatly enhanced set of personal notes to coincide with the original video in my personal archive. I can search by keyword to determine the video and re-watch at my own convenience on my own devices and without the need for an Internet connection.
Seattle Resident Bruce Miller uses a combination of landscape and portrait monitors for various tasks. Portrait monitors are often better for viewing newspaper pages, such as The New York Times archives available through its TimesMachine.
Western Gray Squirrel (Sciurus griseus), Gold Hill, Oregon. © Maxine Cass
Member News and Announcements
Bruce Miller suggests watching “Anatomy of a Best Seller” from the May 1, 1999 session at the ASJA National Conference; publicly available on C-Span. “The author’s story of getting the idea in the bath is entertaining.”
Joanna Nesbit (joannanesbit@comcast.net) is seeking ideas and contacts for future ASJA PNW meeting speakers.
NEWSLETTER PRODUCED BY
EDITOR: Maxine Cass
PROOFREADER: Catherine Kolonko
TECHNICAL EXPERTISE: Bruce Miller
*All stories are copyright by their respective writers.
*All photographs and illustrations are copyright by their creative makers.
*All rights are reserved to each of them for their own material.