Song Share: Things I Couldn’t Keep

Rusty Bolts flickr photo by junkyardpatinafan shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license A song, for and inspired by Terry Elliott, as well as some other swirling things in my mind I couldn’t keep in the box. Things I Couldn’t Keep (for Terry) (you know) A life goes by in the blink of an eye […]

Book Review: Design is Storytelling

I never really thought all that much of how designing a physical space or a physical object is really about the invisible art of telling a story. In Design is Storytelling, by Ellen Lupton, that fact comes to the surface — that the decisions we make in creating tangible objects or immersive experiences can have […]

In Kintsugi: The Writer’s Voices in the Reader’s Head

In the latest edition of the Kintsugi magazine — an online publishing experience of gathering writers across the Mastodon network — I wrote a piece for the third editing, thinking about the experience of reading in online spaces, and how the voices of writers inhabit my reading experiences. My piece is at pages 16 and […]

Book Review: Anatomy of a Song

Here’s a book that hit a number of buttons for me. It’s about music. It’s about songwriting. It’s an oral history project. It’s an inside look at how creative people are creative. Anatomy of a Song: The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits by Marc Meyers is apparently a riff off a Wall Street Journal […]

Slice of Life (Day 27): Lifting Lines and Making Poems

(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write all through March, every day, about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.) I’ve been know to lift lines, to steal words from other people’s blog posts […]

#NetNarr: Getting Enlightened on Aspects of FanFic

The third “studio visit” by the folks at the Networked Narratives earlier this week was with two interesting women with extensive experience and understanding about the worlds of Fan Fiction. If you know nothing about FanFic, then this studio visit is worth your time. There are entire communities — very large ones, in fact — where […]

#NetNarr: Can Data Help Us Tell a Story?

Terry Elliott shared this Ted Talk out, via Vialogues for annotation, and I really appreciated the ways that Ben Wellington uses storytelling as the frame for using data in meaningful ways. I am following Terry into an online course about data storytelling for journalism (he is in there, to learn more about teaching his university […]

#DigiWriMo Book Review: The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music

  This book — The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music (A Fresh Look at the Art of Hip-Hop, from Old-School Beats to Freestyle Rap) by Paul Edwards — is wonderful mix of research, insights by Edwards, and voices of oral histories by many rappers and artists on the Hip-Hop scene, talking about influences and origins of the music […]

Random Notes from a Convergence

Normally, I am more organized with my thinking at conferences, but I didn’t bring a laptop to this past week’s Annual Meeting of the National Writing Project in Atlanta, and my notes and media are all over the place. So, this is a bit of this and a bit of that. I am sure I […]