Finding one's (northern) (southern) (eastern) (western) voice - another reason I blog

Copyright Ruth Seeley 2007.

I made reference, a couple of blog posts ago, to the fact that I'll be attending Northern Voice, the Vancouver blogging conference, later this month. It runs from Thursday, February 21 to Saturday, February 23. http://2008.northernvoice.ca/

The kick-off dinner is being held this year in the Polynesian Room at Vancouver's Waldorf Hotel http://www.critiki.com/cgi-bin/location.cgi?loc_id=196, and I am really looking forward to it. (Last year's was held in the gorgeous Volunteer Vancouver building on Main Street, I believe - should have gone, I heard rumours of fountains of chocolate or chocolate swans or something equally extravagant.)

I also made a comment, in my previous blog post, that I was going to attend for the second year, despite having had a really miserable time at last year's conference. Some of it was my fault, some of it was a case of 'I should just have stayed in bed today' and some of it rests squarely on the conference organizers, or at least those tasked with event planning.

Northern Voice (the conference itself), is held at UBC's Forestry Building. For those of you who've never visited the UBC campus - it's huge. It's freaking huge. The UBC population is almost 10 times bigger than Kincardine, the small southwestern Ontario town in which I lived for a year before moving to BC in 2002. And I managed to get lost there for months. The estimates I've seen are that UBC has a student, staff and faculty population of 50,000. It is a vast expanse of land. What can I say - they didn't call it the Wild West for nothing. The only place I can really find with ease at UBC is its marvellous bookstore, and that's only when the roads aren't completely torn up and I don't have to take six detours.

It was pissing rain on the Saturday of Northern Voice 2007. Yes it's Vancouver, and I am actually one of the few people I know who don't mind the rain here and don't complain about it much, even though I've always thought snow was the smarter form of precipitation. Snow doesn't get you wet and it's - well - it's usually much more scenic than rain. Still, it was Toni Onley's dreamy coastal landscapes I had in mind when I moved here. This was unusual rain for Vancouver though - hard rain - big drops that really got you wet. I think of this as Eastern rain rather than Western rain. Mean rain. Purposeful rain. Its purpose being to mess you up in a quest to replenish the water table as quickly as possible.

For some inexplicable reason, the bus driver I had was not familiar with UBC campus and couldn't help me find the Forestry Building. This is the point at which I step up to the plate and acknowledge that I could have done my 'how to get there' research instead of just glancing at the map and assuming the bus driver would know his or her route. And that I could have left the house earlier.

As it happened though, I ended up wandering in the aforementioned pissing rain, waiting for another bus that would actually take me to the Forestry Building, getting myself into a completely foul temper, and arriving an hour late for the conference.

So - off to a bit of a rough start. I ran into a few people I knew and attended two sessions, both of which were interesting. Then it was lunch time. I quailed at the prospect of heading back out into that mess, so armed myself with the map listing all the area lunch venues. Most of them were at least a quarter-mile's hike from the Forestry Building. Many of them were much, much further away. I had already noticed that the Tim Horton's in the building itself wasn't open weekends, and thought it odd that they hadn't made an exception for a weekend when a conference was going on. Surely it would have been worth their while to open up on a Saturday just this once? While I'm not a fan of Tim's, some hot soup and a sandwich would have been really nice. I might even have been able to forget my wet socks in the convivial atmosphere of Tim's.

But no. Muttering to myself about it being one of those days I was going to get soaked four times (to and from the conference, to and from lunch), I headed for the next-nearest provision-providing venue, Starbucks. A latte and a pumpkin scone would have been just fine. On the way to the Starbucks I noticed an independent corner store and thought, oh, I don't care what their sandwiches are like, this is a better idea than Starbucks. Apparently not. The store had been robbed earlier in the day and the police were still conducting their investigation. Even though I had cash, the store owners had been forbidden to conduct business until the police wrapped up their investigation. Starbucks it was, then.

Obviously I wasn't the only person who had taken public transit to the conference, and great minds do think alike (fools seldom differ). I've never seen a Starbucks slammed the way that one was. And no one looked happy, which is most unusual. Didn't take long to figure out why. There was no food. I mean, there may have been one of those cinnamon straws. But other than that, the glass display case was pretty much empty. The Northern Voice organizers had failed to notify Starbucks that there was a conference going on. The staff were bewildered and embarrassed. Run off their feet too, since they'd been unexpectedly slammed.

So I had a latte, which I think I consumed perched on a cement planter in a courtyard that provided some shelter from the rain, and thought about going back to the conference. And I decided not to. The wet socks were starting to get to me, and I was beginning to feel murderous thoughts.

This year's going to be different. A lot different. For one thing, I'll be driving or being driven. For another, I know where the Forestry Building is. I'm also going to give the Starbucks a call myself and make sure they know there's a conference going on. I might even call the Tim Horton's and suggest they open up on Saturday. I've already done the feedback thing* for Northern Voice 2007 and mentioned these issues, so perhaps my phone calls will be reminders only, if the organizers took my advice. If they didn't, I'm not taking any chances.

Which brings me to the third reason why I blog. In my post 'Columnists I Like' I talked about the joy of writing freedom. That freedom doesn't matter much until and unless you have truly found your voice as a writer. When I first worked in public relations I was amazed at how difficult it was to master the right tone and style of PR writing. I'd written poetry, short stories, book reviews, magazine articles, ad copy, research and non-research essays, part of a screenplay...this writing thing wasn't really a problem for me. I've kept a copy of my first case study, which went through about 45 drafts before it was finalized, as one of my writing samples. I had significant editing help from at least two of my colleagues. A red pen was used, until my always expressive face assumed a rather stricken look. A black pen was substituted for the red. That didn't really help my ego much. And then, finally, something clicked for me and I was able to rewrite the case study myself and get it approved. Everything became a lot easier after that.

Looking back, this is how I'd describe it. Have you ever worn cowboy boots? I've only owned one pair, and I'm not sure what happened to them, but I'm quite sure I cried when I got rid of them. I loved them. I loved them when I first saw them in the store and I loved wearing them. There was a two-week period when I first started wearing them though, when I actually contemplated cutting off my feet. I've never had blisters on the tops of my feet before. I've never had blisters on my heels that bled. I've never stacked bandaids one on top of each other to try to prevent further damage and a little cushioning just so I could get through the breaking in process.

Mastering another form of writing - and a difficult one - was like breaking in those cowboy boots. Ultimately it was worth the struggle. Much to my surprise, writing is a skill that continues to develop the more of it you do. I'd add, 'as long as you continue to read good writing,' as my one caveat. A couple of years after my first case study, the receptionist at work got a call from someone asking to be put through to the company's best writer. My boss wasn't in, so she directed the call to me. Turns out it was a headhunter, and while the lovely Diana was outraged at being tricked this way, it was pretty hard for me not to giggle with sheer joy at the compliment she'd paid me.

I remember a client objecting strenuously to a press release and demanding to know why we'd chosen to use each and every phrase and structured it the way press releases are properly structured. I'm not sure what possessed me, but I do know we'd sweated over this release (our 'best teams' approach wasn't quite working in this instance, I'm afraid). I couldn't help myself. Even though I was the most junior person there, I had to be the one to justify our approach. And I did, mounting an extremely convincing case for why the release needed to be left alone if the client's goals were to be met. That release and the subsequent media relations we did with it led to the longest feature coverage I've ever helped generate.

And that was the point at which I realized I had found my voice as a writer. While I may not understand it on a conscious level when I begin to write, whatever method I have, whether it's research or an outline or that weird form of subconscious analysis that happens when you absorb a new form of writing by osmosis from reading, reading, reading...I now know there's no form of writing I can't master. One of the best things I learned at my former agency was to stop being neurotic about my writing. The collective writing approach used in a PR agency means you can't be too proprietary about your work. If you were to have a hissy fit every time something you wrote got changed, you wouldn't make it through the probationary period. There's no room for that sort of journalistic ego in PR writing, and there's also no time for it. The sort of jockeying for position (front page, please, and if not that, I'll settle for a section front page) that goes on at newspapers won't cut it. The learning process may be painful. Hair may be pulled. Tears may be shed. Paper may well be crumpled and flung. (Gee, I manage to make a pretty much silent activity seem quite melodramatic, don't I?)

Then, of course, once you have found your voice, you must use it. Or lose it. And so, I blog....

* As you can see from the first link I've posted, the organizers have listened and are including lunch! Oh, it's so nice to be listened to. Heeded. To have one's views taken into account. I'm still calling Starbucks to give 'em a heads up though.

Be who you are

Got my ‘monthly ezine for communications professionals’ from the British Association of Communicators in Business this morning and the first article I clicked was ‘Need to establish some blogging guidelines?’ It wasn’t so much an article as a paragraph referring readers to the guidelines IBM has now made public for its employees who blog. www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Nice definition of a blog in this article: 'A blog is a tool individuals can use to share their insights, express their opinions, and communicate within the context of a globally distributed conversation.' It's that globally distributed part I like about this definition. As I track my readers, I can't help but get excited when I see my blog has 'penetrated' another country. Who's reading me in Mexico and the Netherlands? I don't know, but hello and welcome!

I also really liked the discussion of personal responsibility (number three in the article) and this advice: 'Speak in the first person. Use your own voice; bring your own personality to the forefront; say what is on your mind.' The only thing I'd add to this excellent list is the caveat, 'Beware of blogging before you've had coffee - both your thinking and typing skills may well be impaired.' All right, that's me being facetious. There probably are a couple of things I'd add to a list of guidelines for employees who blog, based on my experience with a public relations agency and as a manager in the corporate communications department of a former client:

Be wary of your own motivation when blogging about your employer;

and

Don't get too specific, either in what you say about the company for which you work or in the depth of your exploration of a subject.

Both these guidelines need a little explanation.

Be wary of your own motivation when blogging about your employer

Some people aren't very happy with their employers and are frustrated because they don't see the change they desire happening, no matter how long they wait or how often they express their opinions. Not to be unkind or disrespectful, but I am not going to tell you how to load fuel into a nuclear reactor. Please don't try to tell me how (or when!) to write a press release. Unless you're on the senior management team of an organization (and sometimes not even then), you don't really know all the factors in play regarding decisions the company is making and challenges it's facing. And if the CEO and/or the corporate communications department were to tell you absolutely everything, not only would they not get anything done, they'd probably be arrested for some sort of securities violation. Being micro managed isn't a lot of fun and the CEO doesn't do it to you. Return the favour, will ya?

Don't get too specific, either in what you say about the company for which you work or in the depth of your exploration of a subject.

In other words, don’t go on and on and on, and don’t overrate the fascination of your readers with your subject matter. Chances are that if you have to spend four paragraphs explaining why the poor performance of this widget is costing the company time and money and your invention would work much better (even though you’ve already shown the plans to your boss and he really wasn’t interested, nor was your boss’s boss), you’re being too ‘granular.’ Now, repeat after me: the tree is part of the forest. The tree is part of the forest. The tree is part of the forest.

Here’s the link for the CiB web site if you want to subscribe to the ezine yourself: www.cib.uk.com/

On a more personal note: Happy Valentine’s Day to all. This is the 17^th anniversary of my father’s death, and it is the first year I will be able to visit his gravesite. Not sure if I’m going to go today or not as the weather is looking extremely iffy. It has always struck me as so appropriate that the man who taught me most of what I know about how to be a kind, loving, and compassionate person should have died on Valentine’s Day. One of the things I loved most about my father was the fact that he was truly incapable of driving by someone who needed help without offering to help them (I mean this in both the literal and the figurative senses). To focus on the literal though: in the days before cars became a lot more reliable (and before cell phones were invented), they used to break down by the side of the road a lot more often than they do now. We had one car that perversely broke down in the middle of the one 23-mile stretch of road between Ottawa and the lake where there was nothing - nada - zip - almost every weekend. My father never saw a motorist in distress without stopping and offering to help change a tire, give someone a lift to the gas station, or offer to call for a tow from the next town. If ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ isn’t the bedrock and cornerstone of a sweet and loving nature I don’t know what is. Proof that the golden rule works? I still remember the woman at the farm somewhere within a 45-mile radius of Ottawa who made us scones with homemade jam and tea and gave us the recipe for scones while we waited for our car to be fixed.

Columnists I like – another step towards the answer to why I blog

Gargoyle on the Burrard Bridge, originally uploaded by The River Thief. Copyright Ruth Seeley 2006

Back in the early 80s, when I worked in the magazine and newspaper business, I used to eagerly await the next issue of Esquire magazine so I could read Harry Stein’s Ethics column. The first issue of Esquire I ever saw was, I think, in 1980, and the cover featured either a hand-tinted photo of the cowboy Ronald Reagan from one of his old movies, or a hyper-realistic portrait. Someone else took over the Ethics column after a few years, and it wasn’t quite the same. But for those three or four years when Harry was writing that column, it was the first thing I read in the magazine every month, regardless of who was on the cover.

In the late 70s or early 80s there was a Globe and Mail ‘he said, she said’ column. I can’t even remember who wrote it: Marni Jackson and M.T. Kelly? It was fun, partly because it predated the whole Venus/Mars thing. What Kelly lacked in wit was compensated by his sheer tenacity. And he was certainly outclassed on the wit front, but that was part of what made the column fun to read.

In the last couple of decades I have moved away from magazines, and I’m not quite sure why. I try to like The Walrus and I’ve subscribed, but it’s not working for me. I think it’s actually a design issue – there’s something wrong with the use of white space and while I am not a fan of the ‘nine parts photo, one part writing’ style of magazine (think People, US, any other sound-bite style of wide-circulation, determinedly anti-intellectual publication), a magazine is not a novel. I expect to see top notch photography and illustration incorporated with award-winning design as well as read award-calibre articles.

I’m still puzzling over the point of Vancouver’s latest entry into the magazine sweepstakes, Granville. A magazine about sustainability that doesn’t feel obliged to either define the term or to understand it is a bit of a puzzle to me, but it’s free and they’re spending some decent money on photography and illustrations, so I’ll look at their photos of what I can only describe as ‘salvage design’ (clothes made from or incorporating bits and pieces of pre-existing, sometimes vintage clothing) and try to find an article that’s actually worth reading.

For the most part, favourite columnists have been replaced for me by bloggers, who have pretty much the same editorial control of their subject matter as magazine and newspaper columnists – almost total. I can’t say, other than Patia Stephens’ wonderful blog, A Drivel Runs Through It (www.patiastephens.com), that I’ve developed a blogger loyalty that equates to my columnist loyalty to Harry Stein. I may yet, as I further refine the blog roll and get deeper into the blogging process. But obviously for me that is the incredible appeal of blogging: editorial control of my product. You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to read it, but it is pure joy to be able to write about what I want to write about when I want to write it without any kind of filter (editor, publisher, outraged advertiser, employer) trying to impose his or her vision of how the story should go. It’s my story. I’ll tell it the way I choose to, thank you.

Recently though I have found myself drawn more and more to Heather Mallick’s writing, which I encounter on the CBC web site. I’ll be reading about how grateful Squamish is that something has finally been done to make the Sea to Sky Highway safer and then read the article on the latest Superbug taking hold in Vancouver and there’ll be a little box with a provocative headline that leads me to Heather Mallick’s latest column, and I just have to click on it. Today’s was no exception: “A house is a home, not an investment.” A woman after my own heart, obviously. For those of you who’d rather read her article than mine, here you go: www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20080211.html

Perhaps it’s because she describes herself as having an ‘old fashioned MA in English literature’ or the fact that she calls herself a ‘full-time reader’ in the bio on her web site (www.heathermallick.ca). Her writing style has a lot to do with it though. She writes in a way that is accessible without being patronizing. She’s not dumbing it down for anyone, but she’s obviously a fan of the ‘don’t use a dollar word when a quarter word will do’ rule. Lovers of language and readers of literature (or at least this one) regard that as the inevitable sand trap of writing (this is probably the only golf metaphor you’re ever going to encounter on this blog), the temptation to use a big beautiful word because it sounds great and means exactly what you’re trying to express. Think ‘sycophant’ versus ‘yes man.’ Yes, sycophant has the advantage of being gender-neutral, although in my world it doesn’t need to be, since I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered a ‘yes woman’ – that must be an experiential thing though, having grown up during the second wave of feminism.

The point is that pretty much everyone knows what a yes-man is, while sycophant is going to send a fair percentage of readers to the dictionary or just alienate them because they don’t know what it means. Naturally the context should supply incontrovertible clues to the word’s meaning, but it doesn’t always. I recall becoming incensed by a colleague’s persistent use of the word ‘matrix’ because I never really knew what the hell he was talking about. When I looked it up and discovered he meant chart, grid, point at which two things intersect, I wanted to slap him for being a professional communicator who valued his own ability to confound over plain speech. I will also confess that I would have to do the same research I’ve done about 40 times already to explain to you what is meant by the phrase ‘paradigm shift.’ It’s glib, it’s catchy, it does mean something important, but it’s a phrase I find immediately alienating and I have obviously developed a mental block about it.

More on this subject (the wilfully obscure school of language arts) at some unspecified future date.

I liked what Heather Mallick had to say in her article about housing. The phrase ‘starter home’ first came to my attention back in the mid ‘80s when I was living in Toronto and working for The Financial Post. One of the copy editors was looking to buy a house the year Toronto housing prices rose a spectacular 47%. Sadly I was looking for a place to live at the time, and had not yet adopted my best apartment-hunting strategy: find a building in which you want to live, put in an application and get approved, wait for a vacancy and move when there is one. I met a lot of people apartment hunting. The majority weren’t landlords, although I am still stunned when I remember the tiny and very imperfect space on offer in High Park for an exorbitant sum and the landlord’s wail that renting out three apartments in the house at these far-above-market-value prices would barely cover his mortgage. I am not sure whether I actually said to him, “Sucks to be a real estate speculator, don’t it?” or whether I just thought it. Even if I didn’t say it, my non-poker face no doubt conveyed precisely that message. One place we looked at had 75 applicants for a single, overpriced, not particularly charming apartment. A freelance editor and a jazz musician didn’t stand much of a chance of getting to the top of that heap.

And these are some of the issues Mallick addresses in her column. Yes, a house may well be the single biggest purchase most of us ever make in our lives. Yes, real estate has almost always been a good investment, and unless one buys at the very high end of a market cycle and then experiences rapidly rising interest rates without commensurate salary inflation, it is difficult to lose money buying a home. Of course there are other factors – neighbourhoods change and become more or less desirable depending on who and what moves in, failing to do any sort of upkeep at all will affect resale value, your quiet lane might suddenly become a major traffic avoidance route, etc.

But the real point is this: shelter is a basic and fundamental human need. When that need becomes perverted into a way to make money rather than satisfaction of that fundamental need, something huge is lost. We are already living, in the Western world, in unrooted times. Many of us live thousands of miles from our families and that support network. It’s highly unlikely my mother would have been able to continue working if my grandmother hadn’t lived in the same city and hadn’t been more than willing to look after me whenever I got a childhood disease. I missed almost six weeks of school the year before I had my tonsils out, with one strep throat and bout of tonsillitis after another culminating in scarlet fever (which was really exciting because I had to be quarantined and everyone in the house had to take penicillin along with me – this made me feel extraordinarily self important in an “I am the avenger and I carry death – or at least bad sickness – within me” kind of way). And there’s no way either of my parents could have afforded to take that much time off work to look after me while I was sick.

As the urbanization of populations continues, it is less and less likely that we will be able to live anywhere near where we grew up. There was a great article I read many years ago about how the creation of Silicon Valley meant that almost no one who had grown up in towns like Palo Alto or Mountain View, CA, would ever be able to buy a house there, even though their parents had done so with ease long before networking became a verb. Nor, unless they were only children, would they ever inherit a house or enough land on which to build their own. Like the second and third sons of the English gentry in Jane Austen’s time, alternatives would have to be created – we can’t all be squires and inherit the baronetcy – some of us will have to look to the army and the church for our careers and revenue streams. For those who grew up in what became Silicon Valley, the answer was a fairly massive exodus not only from the area but from the state itself to places like North and South Carolina where homes were still affordable.

Sadly, too, the global village and the cottage industries outlined by Marshall McLuhan aren’t happening as quickly as most of us would like, and it is still the rare individual who can work from home and make a decent living. I am beginning to think I should take up farming so no one thinks it’s strange that I want to work from home, a home in a rather remote location preferably (oh cabin in the woods, I continue to hear your siren song).

But a focus on what is affordable where and what, precisely, the fallout will be from the sub-prime mortgage mess misses the most important point in all of this. Current legislation designed to discourage real estate speculation is pretty toothless. In Ontario you have to own a house for a year before you can sell it or you are considered a speculator (I’m not sure what sort of penalty there is for this in law). In British Columbia, in the run-up to the Olympics, it’s only six months. Sure, there are some provisions to discourage landlords and property developers from buying houses on spec and flipping them in BC. Having to give tenants a month’s free rent when they’re evicted so a house can be renovated or demolished to build a monster home on the lot is one of those provisions. It’s not enough, however.

What is required is – ha – sorry I can’t resist – a paradigm shift in the way we look at shelter and at real estate. That paradigm shift will involve a return to the concept of houses as homes rather than as investments. It will also involve a commitment on our part to the concept of universal shelter for all that is similar to our commitment to the notion of universal health care. There was no mass exodus from Canada when our version of socialized medicine was introduced. And those stories about the ‘brain drain’ were also wild exaggerations in terms of number. We have experienced nothing like the exodus Great Britain saw during the Thatcher era. We have not lost a generation of our educated middle class to other countries. Most Canadians took a look at the pros versus the cons of higher American salaries and lower taxation and were able to do the math in our own heads: yes we pay much higher rates of taxation but we’re getting not only universal health care but almost-universal access to post-secondary education for those tax dollars. On the whole we’re pretty happy with the bargain we’ve made, I think. It is worth it.

Now if only we could wrap our heads around the need to ensure no one in this country is homeless. A huge part of that, I think, is refusing to participate in the commoditization of housing. Don’t do the bidding war thing. Don’t buy a house you don’t like as a ‘starter’ home just for the sake of ‘getting into the market.’ Don’t be one of those people who spend 70 per cent of your take-home income on housing (that would be most Vancouverites these days). Life is too short and mortgages are too long to live a half life in a house that isn’t a home in a neighbourhood you don’t like.

For another take on the housing crisis - and it is a crisis, one way or other, because as house prices rise, so do rents, here's Mary-Ellen Lang's recent article as well: www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_lang/20080208.html

P.S. Okay I just laughed aloud at the line in this column for The Guardian in which Heather Mallick announces there will never be a sex scandal involving a Canadian politician because, let’s face it, they’re all too unattractive. She obviously hasn’t met the charming and highly personable Vancouver-Fairview MLA Gregor Robertson http://thetyee.ca/News/2004/11/08/NDPNewFaceBusiness/. Not that he would ever do anything scandalous.

www.heathermallick.ca/guardian.co.uk-columns/top-quality-sleaze.html