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when i first knew Dave, he was a cocky 22 year old with a scruffy black notebook always in hand. i asked him once – because my own writing was then so closeted i turned pink anytime i cracked the spine on my journal – what he wanted to write for.

did he have an end in mind? a great novel? an opus? a garret to freeze in?

i think he laughed. and paused. and then he said, i want to be interviewed by Peter Gzowski.

if you lived in Canada through the 80s and 90s, maybe you know what that means. Gzowski was the lion of CBC morning radio. me, i barely came out of my self-imposed radio-free cloister in time for the end of the man’s career; i passed much of my misspent youth under the impression that radio was merely a commercial haven for swaggering DJs, Rick Astley, and my mother’s beloved Saturday Night Hoedown. but my liberal arts education eventually bequeathed me the CBC at the height of Gzowski’s reign. he accompanied a whole generation of us X-ers into the mornings of our adulthoods, with his courteous curiosity and his capacity to make everyday corners of our huge, vanilla country seem absolutely riveting. he did it not in soundbites but in long, drawn-out conversations that always always made me wish i were the third cup of coffee at that table for two voices.

so when Dave said Gzowski, i understood. Gzowski was not about fame, per se, or writing as discipline and craft and greatness. Gzowski, as a definition of success, was about access; the honour of sitting at the table where the big story was being told.

Dave was an early adopter of the 21st century outlook on creative expression. art, like technology, is not an end in itself; it is simply what it affords us. it is – or can be, if one is lucky – a seat at the table.

in the old model, singular greatness was supposed to be both its own reward. it was also supposed to launch one to fame and fortune, but it was vulgar to consider those goals. success was entirely a vertical game.

Gzowski was my first introduction to the idea that it might be more horizontal, more about voice and access and participation in a conversation than some mysterious process of coming to exist on whole new planes of merit and grandeur.

Peter Gzowski died almost ten years ago, on my thirtieth birthday.

yesterday, a couple of weeks before my fortieth (mercy), i got closer to Dave’s old dream than i’d have imagined possible, back then. i was on the CBC’s The Sunday Edition. national radio. a seat at the big table.

i’ll never meet Gzowski, but an hour in the CBC studio talking to Ira Basen, with his convivial, intelligent questions? hearing myself on national radio talking about momblogging and monetization?

i was honoured. and flattered. as The Pogues taught me long ago, when you live with someone years on end, you kinda end up taking their dreams as your own. being on The Sunday Edition is my idea of doing Dave proud. and myself.

and it was as cool as i’d have thought it would be. almost.
***

it is almost impossible – as almost anybody in momblogging will tell you – to talk about momblogging without treading on toes. we’re the Fight Club whose fights and divisions and hurt feelings stem almost entirely from breaching the unwritten rule of not talking about Fight Club. we are a community that hasn’t really been a single community for years, like most in social media. but we still get lumped together  - even by many of us, me included – under the convenient if always controversial and slightly pejorative handle of mommybloggers, and we bristle and feel misunderstood and wonder what the hell we have in common.

even in polite Canada.

the documentary explored The Great Monetization Divide of Mommyblogging. i liked it. my sense was that Ira tried hard to treat both sides of the monetization conversation respectfully.

my voice ended up on the non-monetization side of fence: a partial truth, but you dance in a two-sided polka and you end up in pants or a dress, i suppose. narrative conventions dictate that there BE two sides, given equal air.

i see it more like this: i haven’t monetized this blog, but i do get to speak at conferences, and the blog has gotten me paid work in other venues. i see myself as a part of the networks and economy that make monetization possible.

i said that, but not all of it made it to air. that’s okay. it’s not the CBC’s job to represent me to the world.

that’s MY job.

for me, social media has been about taking the Gzowski model and truly, uh, horizontalizing it: giving regular people platforms on which to publicly tell their own stories and host their own conversations about their riveting corners of otherwise seemingly vanilla worlds.

these platforms are built of people. networked audiences, in peer-to-peer relationships.

social media also has vertical channels, avenues by which ordinary folk can sometimes find seats at tables that were once closed. this too is a sort of democratizing force, compared to the old models of how people got their voices “discovered.” these vertical channels of brand and big media are also increasingly the business engine by which social media sustains itself.

most of us whose audience aspires beyond an intimate network of friends are invested in both the vertical and the horizontal. but that’s what’s getting lost in the increased polarization between monetized and non-monetized camps.

i hear the critique on both sides; personal bloggers are indulgent crap. monetized bloggers are sell-outs. you can be a friend, but my peers are professionals, now. we’re splitting ourselves down the middle based on horizontal or vertical aspirations. and i’m tired of feeling like i’m caught in a bad divorce.

truth is, you can’t have social media without the peer-to-peer connections. then it’s just media, my friends. and there are never going to be jobs for all of us in a traditional media economy. i think we’re stuck with each other, building horizontally as we build vertically, unless we want the whole shebang we’ve built on these peer-to-peer connections to come crumbling down.

a non-monetized blogger benefits from the profile gained by vertical national exposure. people with entirely vertical aspirations need  build enough horizontal peer-to-peer buzz and profile that they begin to stand out to those peering in from the vertical towers. BECAUSE WE’RE IN THE SAME REPUTATION ECONOMY. that’s what social media IS.

the divide between monetized and non-monetized? i think it’s a fake one, a trap we’re party to constructing and leaping into.

remember Jon Stewart in 2004, shrieking at that little Crossfire turd in the bowtie and his so-called liberal foil? YOU’RE HURTING AMERICA! ?? yeh. remember that?

we don’t have to play along with the theatre that divides us by pretending we have nothing in common. a whole lot of us have both horizontal AND vertical aspirations.

but maybe we don’t know how to talk about it. maybe we don’t hear about it on the radio, or even see much of it on Twitter. we start thinking about social media as us and them.

so the CBC documentary? great for me, so long as all those of us who heard it didn’t walk away even more convinced that the polarization is natural and inevitable and hopeless. and moreso, so long as, if we did, we don’t just leave the conversation there.

because the beauty of social media is that sure, an industry giant can explore us and reflect us back to ourselves. but our platforms let us pull up to the table and join the conversation: our critical reflection comes as part of the deal.

social media gives us access: lets us all talk to Gzowski, in the figurative sense. i don’t want to sell that short.
***

can we talk about Fight Club? or blogging? or whatever the hell we ought to call it, from here on in? tell me what YOU want from social media, for 2012. tell me what YOU’RE invested in, out here.

can we split this conversation beyond the two camps, once and for all?

Toronto. Blissdom Canada, year 2.

i had fun. saw some of my favourite people, had interesting conversations, danced, got kissed by a yam puppet, and sat on a panel with Nora Young of CBC Radio’s Spark. i can die happy.

i also realized that social media is slipping through our fingers.

tonight, the night after the morning after the morning after, what i miss is the people. the sitting up late, perched on staircases or outside in the blue air, talking. connecting. cementing tentative bonds of recognition.

that’s what conferences are for: the connecting.

i like to think that’s what social media is for, too. (i mean, not ONLY that. i haven’t been asleep since 2006. i like the word brand, may gawd strike me down).

but after Blissdom this year, for the first time, i have real misgivings about the future of social media.

i think we mighta sold the farm, Virginia. and we didn’t even notice.
***

once upon a time, long long ago before anyone had invented the term SEO, there were days when social media was mostly about peers. finding ‘em. creating relationships.

online platforms were a means of finding others and their ideas, of network-building, and sharing. the connections grew rhizomatically, like weeds, node threading to node without formal goal or overarching strategy. it was a bit of a jungle.

there were always metrics: ways to judge one’s Return On Investment for the time put in. eyeballs on one’s work always mattered, and some identities were bigger than others. so were their networks, and their reputations.

(this world was not a monolith by any means, Virginia: different communities and corners of what was then mostly called “the blogosphere” had their own etiquette, their own implicit rules around reciprocality.)

but it was mostly a world of what’s called produsage: the people who created stuff and shared it were also the consumers of other people’s stuff. that’s what the connections served.

it was more or less a peer-to-peer environment. connections were about interest, even when the people forging the relationship had platforms of different scale. yes, there was cultivation of fame for its own sake, and fawning over major profiles: all the things that metrics encourage. there were ugly things there, too, and inane things, and lots that probably made no difference to the state of the world in general. it was very human. but for all its flaws, it was full of potential.

it was a network model of being in the world, rather than a top-down organizational model. it was emergent rather than planned, and distributed rather than owned by any one entity.

this was, of course, probably rather bewildering to the entities used to owning things.

social media did some pretty crazy things for those of us out there participating. it flattened hierarchies by enabling and encouraging person-to-person connection and actual engagement. it foregrounded individual voices and relationships. and it represented a new way of relating to what had always been untouchable sacred cows: institutions, corporations. it gave us – often more theoretically than in everyday encounters – an agency we had not previously tended to consider possible.

an emergent model, of course, doesn’t provide very good salaries. this is where we get back to Blissdom, Virginia.

since about 2008, there’s been a strong push in social media to monetize, to leverage the platforms and networks users build for a share of advertising and sponsorship dollars. for many, especially for women, this has been an incredible opportunity to work outside the traditional institutional structures of 9-5, as freelancers and entrepreneurs. and especially for women whose social media content relates to domesticity, there’s been an incredible response from traditional mainstream brands with a vested interest in the domestic market.

just as social media was making the personal branded, it made brands personal. they were shifting their broadcast model strategies, we heard, and connecting, and changing.

great. financial opportunity AND agency to forge new paths. i gave a nod of thanks to the car company that drove me around gratis, and to the razor company – was it razors? or orange juice? – for the free manicure.

then i noticed that there seemed to be a whole swath of conversation that had nothing to do with what i do, both from brands and other attendees.

i was okay with that, at first. not everybody wants to be a personal blogger, or – mercy – an academic one. i like money. i can’t fault anyone for wanting to make some.

but it appeared that for a lot of people at the conference, the PURPOSE of social media is to enable individuals to connect with brands. for the purpose of furthering the brands themselves. end story. a path into the machine.

the first – and maybe second – generation of bloggers and social media personalities who worked to forge partnerships with brands and as entrepreneurs tended to do so from a base in peer-to-peer relationships. connections. voices.

some have had incredible business savvy and success, but most have been inclined to promote and preserve some of the values of both independence – from traditional power structures – and interdependence – on each other – that are hallmarks of social media. and traditional power structures have had to treat them accordingly.

there’s a shift occurring, a sea change in discourse. i heard it in the lunch lineups, over cocktail trays, in the tense conversation after the film screening. a significant proportion of conference attendees spoke about their social media goals entirely in terms of connecting with brands. not even primarily as brands themselves – in a sort of peer-to-peer relationship – but as consumers of opportunity, looking to become part of the major institutional system of major media and corporations.

forget agency and voices and relationships. if you are using your network solely to sell the message of a corporate entity, what you are doing is NOT social media, no matter your platform. what you’re doing is at best a marketing job, and more likely something akin to Amway.

i even heard it when i sat on the stage with Tessa Sproule, who is lovely and savvy and Director of Interactive Media at the CBC, but who largely appears to see social media as a way of engaging consumers with her brand.

this is not a two-way street. this is consolidation of power to the old familiar models, in which one can be employer or employed, but not really a whole lot else. the dream of a distributed, collaborative society of creator-consumers?

time to wake up, i think, my friends.

social media is, in too many fields, becoming simply a nice interactive tool by which the traditional corps and powers-that-be gain more eyeballs. they’re not so nervous, anymore. because increasingly people join social media NOT to connect but as a path to a piece of the pie: they’re there not to be public but to gain enough platform to be sponsored or spokespersons or stars, for the traditional monopolized industries.

what do we do about it?

i don’t think we take the pitchforks out. this isn’t about blaming or Othering the new generation. they want jobs. i’ve had jobs. that’s a glass house few of us can stand in.

but we need to ask ourselves what our role IS – and can be – in a social media environment becoming crowded with marketers, not creator-consumers.

we need to understand the potentiality of social media and what it offers us. for me, at least, that’s this space, and the theoryblog – rooms of my own. community. network resources via Twitter and G+ and even Facebook that interact and offer and share with me daily, on topics and perspectives that don’t have a market value.

that a cultural shift like social media has major forces aligned in their own interests against it probably shouldn’t be a surprise. maybe i’ve just been down too deep in the echo chamber to hear it coming. but i do think it’s important to start this conversation, among all of us who want to do more with our online spaces and voices and networks – all of which are very much an integrated part of our so-called REAL lives – than be part of a better bottom line for major brands.
***

what do you see as the future of social media? of blogging conferences? have we sold the farm?

give me hope, Virginia. connect. hold me.

yeh, you. really. you.

okay, fine, not you. but you. and you. and me.

We Have Too Much Stuff.

all of us. i know this because last night i sucked half a century of dirt and dog hair into my lungs, and as God is my witness, before i expire from some dread disease caused by ancient vacuum mites it is on my heart to shout it from the rooftops.

Too Much! Clutter Kills!

i am thinking of having bumper stickers made, except they would sit in a box in some corner of my house and moulder, and i would trip over them, and that…well, yeh.
***

there is an estate sale at my grandfather’s house tomorrow.

i grew up in apartments, so this house is the last of the places i have known since childhood. my whole life, the very same.

i stand in the living room and i see myself in those grainy Instagram-esque Christmas 1972 snapshots, learning to walk on the moss green carpet. and i see him on the same green carpet in May, with the paramedics around us, and all the 39 years between. all equally vivid. it makes my eyes hurt.

yet as we dismantle and sort and clean, the bones of the house grow unfamiliar and strange. i see things i’ve never laid eyes on, things de-coupled from their stories and their contexts. and i am sad, sniffing about unmoored, a dog searching for its master. i look for my grandfather in the vacuum tubes and the tools and the dust and his 1931 First-Prize-winning hand-drawn map of Australia, marked Clifton, age eleven years, that we found in the back of the basement last night.

i look, but i find him again and again on the green carpet, until my brain clamps down and says no more. he is not here. he is gone. now you go, too. vacuum. wipe. sort.

my grandfather was neither packrat nor hoarder, and he was frugal for the most part and loathe to buy new what could yet be fixed or made serviceable. still, forty-five years in the same house yields Stuff, in copious amounts. stuff not touched or cleaned or seen for years. stuff with its stories forever untold, that none of us understand or can make sense of. stuff that my uncle and my father will take today to the dump, and pay to leave.

last night my uncle pried open the enormous canister of the 1967 Central Vac and i managed somehow to dump half of its contents on the basement floor. i inhaled things no human body has any business inhaling, including what i swear was the fur of a dog who’s been dead since i was in high school. you are welcome, eventual buyer of the family home: this is my body, broken for you. i think i have a hairball.

this is part of the circle of life, in our late 20th-century/21st century existences in this privileged part of the world. our elders grow old and die or move to nursing homes, and we cart away decades of precious things that have devolved somehow into crap, and make landfill, and squirrel a few items aside for another generation to deal with when we go.

there are a few billion of us living this way. the rest, we are taught to assume, aspire to it. we get pimped new stuff everywhere we turn.

the math is suspect.
***

before Dave & i die, we should probably clean the shed, for the sake of our children and the grandchildren who do not exist yet. but here’s the ugly truth: we don’t know what to do with the stuff in the shed.

it’s probably useful, if we could actually identify what’s in there or lay hands to most of it. same goes for the upstairs closet. we might need it. we don’t know. life is uncertain. there’s a hurricane on the way.

here’s the problem. stuff is stories. stuff is both aspirational and grounding, a tether to who we think we are.

even this so-called virtual, where we can trade in actual stories, is no antidote.

sure, i like the internet because my clutter stays mostly hidden, ephemeral. admittedly, my semi-defunct delicious account is a poorly annotated mess, and my laptop’s colonized with programs i ended up not using, but the absolute stunning beauty of the world of bits and bites is its immateriality. poof! now you see it, now it floats like a cyberjunk satellite in an orbit you need never encounter again. (this quality became a lot more appealing after auto-save was invented, admittedly).

and yeh, digital clutter is a marginal improvement, at least for safety purposes. paper burns, after all. i own more books than i will ever read in this life, even if you locked me in the attic for decades with nothing but books and a bucket of fishheads to sustain me. i have paperwork stuffed away in files that i vaguely suspect no one will ever look at again. every surface of my kitchen is plastered with folksy child-made art collages leaking glue and wasting trees left, right, and centre.

but. all of it, digital and trip-over-able, mostly gets in the way of living. it demands. it wants cleaning, curating, sorting, attending to. it wants time. it wants you to buy matching oven mitts.

someday, my children or their children or some poor sot will have to dig their way through what i leave behind on this planet when i leave it. you too. what the hell do i want them to find?

my grandmother’s Art Deco wedding china? my grandfather’s WWII documents? maybe, if i can remember to tell them the stories beforehand. maybe photos – whether albums or holographs, it doesn’t matter. maybe a couple of beautiful things that have some monetary value: art or antiques, perhaps, that they can sell or keep. that’d be thoughtful of me, if only i owned stuff like that.

maybe the blog. Thomas King said, “The truth about stories is that’s all we are.” but really. are they going to read it?

at least it doesn’t require vacuuming.

…what about you? what are you keeping? what do you want to be keeping?

(and while i’m cleaning the shed: anybody need a free Supercycle ten-speed, circa 1984? it’s on the street outside my house: finders-keepers. huzzah).

California was mythical, even in reality.

San Diego was a whirl of sunshine and parties and fish tacos. i don’t eat fish. i almost never stay up for 24 hours dancing and talking about porn and philosophy with people i’ve never met before. i don’t often read my own words to crowds of thousands, or try to hug them all afterwards. yet i swear it happened. and Mark Twain was right, San Francisco in the summer was colder than winters i’ve spent. people had down jackets on. in August. i hadn’t believed. my unbelief is fixed, now. and i have a new sweatshirt.

one week away. one week without children. first time in more than five years.

the verdict is in: we still like each other. there is still some syncopated rhythm between us two, even when the two small drummers and the routine we all march to are removed. it is good to know. you hope, but you cannot quite know.

mind you, we spar more in their absence. more attention to give, to smooth out, to make something of. i am difficult. i work overhard at this. it may sometimes be exhausting.

(we’ve flown all night, seated in front of a very loud, entitled woman who was apparently new to the 21st century and to the concept of not sharing every. single. thought in her head at full volume with the entire. fucking. airplane. did you know that there are screens on the seatbacks? yep. she got a full tutorial which she repeated for everybody. at midnight. did you know that the seats tilt back? full tutorial on that too. she ordered a chicken sandwich at one am. turned on her light so she could dissect it for the listening pleasure of the whole plane. she didn’t eat it. her voice was a giggly caricature of middle-aged feminine faux-passivity. yes, she probably had anxiety. or mental health issues. still, it was a five hour flight and even with my earplugs in i only managed to sleep about 45 minutes. i wanted to smother her with a lipstick. Dave slept like a baby. all that to say he might have been a little wiped out.)

but we had fun. and i was surprised. it was my first BlogHer, and our first trip to California, and i thought it was possibly a ridiculous mistake to try to combine the two. but i am not one to shy from a ridiculous mistake if i can kill two birds with one stone, and ill-conceived whim or no, it rescued me from the nail-biting of having to try to find a roommate for the conference and discovering i am actually a pariah whom nobody wants to sleep with. even platonically. so, i brought Dave.

and he was game. really game, genuinely hey, i’m putting my best self out there game and hey, i am totally happy to take care of myself while you hang with your friends game and really just altogether agreeable and cool and some part of us time-travelled back years to a life we left behind a long time ago, where we were social and fey and the life of the party. he even deigned to play tourist in San Francisco and take pictures of me in cheesily mythic locales, waving at the ghosts of Jerry Garcia and Jack Kerouac. we danced, and we were flaneurs wandering city streets and we sat with old friends and laughed, and made new ones. i turned my head once, sidelong, and said hey you in a tone i haven’t used in years, and he laughed and i thought we could have a rocking good time at the old age home someday, us two.

(our cupcake cuteness courtesty of the lovely & talented Schmutzie, aka Elan Morgan).

so is it true? is joint BlogHer the key to cohabital bliss?

well kinda. BlogHer itself is everything you think it might be, and more. people will write better on that than i. it’s huge, and overwhelming, and fabulous to see people, and i’m not much for swag but i liked the BlogHer folk immensely and loved having my arms around people who’ve previously mostly been words and stories, for me.

all that would have been a pleasure on my own. i actually spent a lot of the conference on my own, because Dave’s pass was only for the evenings. so i met new people. i researched. i sat in on sessions and discussions. i had my nails painted yellow – for free – by a day hire for Tropicana. i sat backstage with the Voice of the Year women, which made me feel ten feet tall and wrapped in a hand-stitched quilt of kindness and support.

but when i stepped out onstage in front of everyone, i knew he was there.

no need to explain it later, to try to capture it. i knew his face was smiling up at me, a pillow for the quilt.

because this is the secret rule, people, the one that is the key to all public coupledom beyond the bounds of cloistered domesticity and duty. one simple thing.

your spouse needs to get that people online are real. that’s it. if you leave it to BlogHer to shove that message through an unwilling skull, you’re wasting half your weekend.

but if you ever had a love letter relationship, it’ll work. if your partner understands that connecting with people through words makes for deep ties, bring ‘im. bring ‘er. give ‘er.

it helps if he or she likes people. and is maybe your friend, as much as or more than your romantic mate. BlogHer is no space for jealousy.

it also helps if he or she is cool not knowing everybody. because even you won’t. no matter who you are.

and if he or she is cool wandering off alone sometimes, so you can connect with people as yourself and not just a member of a twosome.

and if he or she is willing to hold his or her own, and be your social equal, whatever that means for the two of you and the circles you run in, that’s the clincher. if you’re a talker or a joker or a wild party-dancer and your blog community are Just Like You and your spouse isn’t, he or she may stick out as an extra, rather than a member. there are all kinds of intersecting communities there to be part of, and they’re porous and fairly welcoming, but they are based on affinity. membership is extended, if a person can step into the roles available.

know your people. and your person. if you think they’d be a rotten fit, don’t do it to any of you: don’t go to BlogHer together.

if you need to justify your hundred internet friends to your loved one, you will have a miserable time. if you need to justify your loved one to your hundred internet friends, you will have a miserable time.

if your loved one likes the idea of meeting and expanding your circle of internet friends – and perhaps taking The Palinode hat shopping in the process – then consider a party pass and a shared room.

you may surprise yourselves.

and when you go home, to the other life, the small world where few of us are superstars, you will not have to explain anything. you will crash together back into it, neither of you owing the other. and you will think, damn, am i lucky.

hello kiddos. we missed you. we’re home. and we’re good.

there was this line in Heave, maybe twenty-five pages in: Anne of Green Gables does the Big Time.

i read that line and exhaled a great, dramatic sigh and thought, there it is. the adolescent dream of a proper PEI girl.

the protagonist, she’s in London. a girl from the Maritimes, twenty years old and drunk as a sailor. quite profane, also high, and busy passing out in a graveyard. but in London.

when i was a sensitive foolhardy kid dying to be absolutely anywhere else on the planet but here where god and parochialism had planted me, far too big of head for the world i knew but far too small and provincial for anywhere else, i dreamed of London. i had barely been to Moncton, but i read everything about London i could get my grubby paws on. Boy George lived there. David Bowie lived there. actual straight men apparently lived there too, but they were not much on my radar when i was thirteen. i read and i hungered and i dreamed, because my horizons had suddenly outgrown Anne of Green Gables and i had no clue what came next.

had i read Heave at thirteen, i might not have needed to live it all quite so messily. but since i did, reading Heave was like finding a fictional kindred spirit.

not that Heave is meant for thirteen-year-olds, by any means. it ‘s the coming-of-age story of a quirky, singular, imaginative girl-woman, struggling to find her place in the richly cloistered, old-fashioned world of her Maritime hometown…and alternately, in the wide-open anonymous wonderland of danger and self-destruction that a city like London can be when all you have to hold you together is other people’s stories of who you are.  Heave is the story of a deeply-rooted Maritime sense of place and an even more deeply-rooted sense of culture and hierarchy and everybody in their place that anyone who has ties to this part of the world will recognize. Heave is ripe with characters, just like Rachel Lynde and Mrs. Blewitt, and with pathos, just like Matthew dying. except that its heroine, Seraphina, is very much an adult. she has a drinking problem. and a bit of a wedding problem, it turns out. she is Anne of Green Gables coming of age in the Big Time of the confusing late twentieth century, in a darkly rollicking story that is, in the end, a love letter to these small Maritime worlds that shape so much of who we are.
***

Christy Ann Conlin of Berwick Nova Scotia published Heave in 2002. a bestseller then, it made CBC’s Canada Reads Top 40 this past fall. it’s enjoying its revival quite nicely, thank you, as evidenced by the fact that three separate book clubs in Charlottetown ended up reading it this winter.

if you haven’t read it, you should. if you’re in PEI – or can hie thee hence to our pastoral province in four weeks’ time – then this post is especially for you.

next month, Christy Ann is coming to PEI. she’s doing a writer’s workshop with the PEI Writer’s Guild. she’s doing a reading from her new YA novel Dead Time at UPEI the evening of May 21st, in the illustrious company of her fellow Bluenoser Kate Inglis of sweet|salty and The Dread Crew, beautiful PEI poet Yvette Doucette, and, erm, moi. i’ll be reading from Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, in whose merciful-Jesus-it’s-a-book pages mah words are being published as we speak. i will be the one swooning, like Anne of Green Gables in the Big Time.

but. but.

book clubs make reading go round. so three book clubs were reading Heave. and members of the three clubs – one of them mine – got to talking on Twitter. somebody said, we should all get together! then somebody said, we should invite Christy Ann! then i said, let’s open it up and invite everybody!

social media, you’re fun. or i’m mad. possibly both.

i talked to Random House/Doubleday, Christy Ann’s publisher for Heave, and they kindly agreed to sponsor her trip.

i talked to D.B. Brickhouse, the newly renovated and swanked-up Off Broadway, already one of Charlottetown’s loveliest restaurants, and they generously agreed to offer their warm and lovely loft space, all exposed-beam and brick, for the event.

i talked to the PEI Writers’ Guild, and they sweetly offered up a sponsorship that will buy some nibblies for the evening.

i talked to Christy Ann, and she said she’d love to.

so. Friday, May 20th, at 8pm in the loft of D.B. Brickhouse on Charlottetown’s historic Sydney Street, an evening of good stories and good discussion and good company and probably lots of laughter and irreverence – a #citybookclub for Heave. good wine will also be for sale. all over the age of nineteen are welcomed, open arms.

please come. join us. we want to make it the book club we always wanted to go to.

and…so you can dive into the story of Seraphina Sullivan, late-twentieth century Anne of Green Gables, and get ready for this glorious soiree, we have copies of Heave for giveaway. four of them, to four commenters on this post, who will be randomly selected by my impartial yet helpful offspring this coming weekend.

all you need to do is leave me a quick story. about books, or London, or what place means to you. or whether you think Anne of Green Gables might have ended up with a substance abuse issue had she grown up a hundred years later. or what you’d like to see at a public #citybookclub. or just a nice loud I WANT ONE. whatever. all welcome. locals who can come on May 20th? especially so.

tell your friends. see you there.

last night i was at yoga with my mom.

(the above sentence entertains the ever-lovin’ crap out of me. part of me wants to wrap it up in shiny paper and turn it this way and that, like a spaceship that fell from the sky, because yoga with my mom sounds so pleasantly suburban and banal and normal and first-world problem-y, and i feel like i should follow it with charming antics about our trip to Starbucks after and our little shopping escapades and pedicures. which i can’t. my mother drinks tea. she sometimes buys us diapers. we have a storied history, my mama and i, but it has never involved exercise or girlfriend hobbies or shopping as therapy. and so we are rather imposters in this story. and yet, there we were, at yoga.)

we show up a little late because yoga starts at the awkward hour of 7pm and getting outta my house at 6:50pm is akin to extricating oneself from the grasp of a slightly hysterical octopus. we grab mats from the bin. my mother has not yet committed to purchasing one: after waiting 62 years to try an exercise class, she is not prepared to marry the first novelty that happens along. i just haven’t gotten to a store this crazy fall.

every week at yoga, my mother and i have set our mats down beside each other along the wall of the little pine-panelled room.  at first, she was nervous, careful and defensive and controlled, uncertain whether she was doing it right. i watched her out of the corner of my eye, whispered little encouragements or explanations. mostly i just watched. i listened to her breathe beside me, took in the shape of her back as we lay on our sides. i am like her, i thought. tiny wrists,  short waist, legs that prefer to be curled under.

it is a strange thing, to watch someone and marvel that body was where i began. it has never occurred to me before. we have never spent much time, my mother and i, just being, taking each other in. or if we did, i have forgotten. children betray their mothers’ care, oblivious.

but i catch sight of her hands beside me as we stretch. her winter hands, rough and cracking with the drop in temperature. for a moment, the 38 year old grunting through downward dog disappears. i am a child in bed, those hands on my hair.

forgotten is not the same as gone.

last night, though, when we walked in the room, there was no space for two mats beside each other. and so we ended up at opposite corners of the classroom.

and i missed her.

i was LESS CALM without her. that sentence is almost as funny as the first. when i was in labour with Oscar, and panicking, my poor mother hid behind Dave’s shoulder, hands raised to God, hyperventilating. i did not find this calming. i have found little about my mother calming in at least twenty-five years, in spite of her earnest efforts.

yet there it is. perhaps if we breathed more, talked less.
***

i know that my children will forget most of these days, this brutal frog-march into winter where i feel like i am failing everyone and everything around me. i feel powerless and inept and uncertain. too many essays churned out, sourced and tidied, sentences cropped into submission. now the words stutter from me, hesitant, timid.

in class later today, i will stand up and talk about blogging, and identity, and how digital technologies have made it possible for whole worlds of conversation about mothering and motherhood and being mothered to exist and to be shared.

i thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to research. what do i know better than blogging and mothering? what am i doing here if not trying to write myself into some kind of coherent existence?

today in class i will them that i started to write two weeks before Oscar was born. almost a year after Finn died. i will tell them i was afraid to speak the open wound of my once and future motherhood, and so i wrote it down, that in-between place of uncertainty and hope and fear that was all that i knew.

i kept writing because that place of uncertainty and hope and fear has never gone away, only changed.

i keep writing because i have no other place to tell my mother that i missed her last night.

but i am afraid.

my life as a student this fall has been a drop down a rabbit hole of half-remembered existence. blogging has spoiled me. i have built a place here where i have grown steadily less afraid to speak. i have unlearned a lifetime of being careful and defensive and controlled, uncertain whether i was doing it right…whatever “it” was. i have grown accustomed to being in a shared conversation.

what i say and write as a student, on the other hand, is graded, judged.

and to stand up and talk about writing my motherhood to a room of mostly childless people, while i swallow the guilt of yet again missing supper with my kids, is to get naked. to expose myself. to judgement that does not come from being inside the conversation of the messiness of motherhood and identity.

i hope they understand. i hope they judge with the same generosity i’ve found out here.

i hope these stories matter, these stories of writing ourselves into some kind of coherence. i hope i can find that coherence again, by opening this life to that other one.
***

do you open the Pandora’s Box of your online life with people who know you in the flesh?

one word.

i think a lot about branding. not in the skeevy marketing sense where i wonder if you’d buy more chicken nuggets if just the right charming cartoon chicken came along to sing the praises of eating her, piece by tiny form-pressed piece. for me, branding is just walking around with clothes on, the bits of yourself you project and trail around behind you. it’s what people think of when they think of you. it’s a conversation you contribute to but don’t control. but i believe it’s a conversation you should BE in.

hence this post. at BlissdomCanada, the closing keynote asked us all, what one word describes you? what’s your presence in the world?

i’m up to my ears in the theory and practice of personal branding and digital identities every day, these days. i’m doing a Ph.D in this stuff. and yet. and yet.

i still couldn’t do it. i couldn’t tell you in a single word what it is i am and am trying to do out here.

i hate definitions. i rail against pinning myself like a science fair butterfly when i am, of course, a unique snowflake, ever-evolving (TM). i thought about it, saw tweets and posts with the #oneword tag and wondered if i had a word and then slapped myself and stuck my head back down into the hell that is my quantitative statistics paper.

unruly thing kept poking up. because i’m writing – or trying to write, starting to write – about the idea of digital identities, and the ways in which being online changes how we interact with the world and see ourselves. this is the story i want to tell. my own. yours.

it occurred to me that knowing my own damn word might be important. might even be aspirational, in a sense. because hell, i’m doing something every time i post, or tweet, or hold a SeaMonkey funeral, or cut off that lady at the supermarket. maybe if i found a word i could live with, it could serve as a little talisman; a stone to keep in my metaphorical pocket. a sightline to where i’m trying to go, as a mother, a grownup, a thinker, a human being.

tonight i figured it out.

my one word is witness.

i’m not going to show up at your door to tell you about Jesus. and i hope not to be spirited away in a possibly fictional protection program for people who see what they shouldn’t.

but what i’m here for is the not looking away. giving voice. nodding to the margins and the complexities and the silliness and the sorrow and the big ideas and the hope that someday, somewhere, it will all matter. trying to figure it all out, especially the stuff our culture likes to sweep under the carpet. dead babies and unwieldy educational theory both, plus the tantrums that occur in between.

this is my life, and my digital identity. this is my branded self.

i’d like to do a better job of it all, really. this is my reminder to myself to keep trying.
***

do you have a talisman in your pocket? a one word, or two, or seven, that you hold onto to try to make sense of what you’re doing online, or off?

the plane guts and dips, sailing in through the headwinds like a drunk girl in unfamiliar heels.

i am in the twelfth row, the hind end of a glorified sardine can. out the rounded rectangle of my window, the earth lurches toward us at strange angles. my stomach tries to grab hold of something solid. my seat vibrates. i note the world carved into patchwork squares below and remember the flight path is over my house.

it is only the gunning roar of the engines that frightens me.

three feet over the runway, we coast like a glider, suspended. an engine sounds its barbaric yawp and i believe for a moment that we will rise again, a phoenix tracing loop-dee-loops against the gray sky. then a wobble, and my eyes wait for the spark and explosion of wing against asphalt.

the perfect metaphor for coming home.

after flying, landing is hard.
***

i spoke at Blissdom Canada: our panel was a big, glorious Kleenex ad. we told stories, and then so did the audience, and they took over in a groundswell. there’s good going on out here in real, individual lives. there was weeping and rejoicing and really, it was better than Christmas. less cleanup.

i watched half my Twitter stream come to life: words made flesh. i sat with people. i touched my hands to your faces, some of you. i heard you laugh. i watched you walk and take up space. i watched your eyes dart about for somewhere to hide.

and i realize now, the story i should have told: everyone is made of secrets.

i heard more secrets in two days in person than i’ve been privy to in years online.

i keep reading that we bloggers spill our guts for breakfast, that we are narcissists, attention whores.  the cruellest volley ever fired in the war between objective truth and pluralism was not that stories don’t count, but that those who tell them must be pathological.

they’re wrong.

we are all soft in the middle, somewhere. yeh, even you with the abs. but you know that. we all have broken places, hurts. we’ve all done terrible or wonderful things in the dark, at least once. we’re too old now to deny it. most of us have had things happen that we didn’t deserve. there’s no point in shame, but it’s damn hard to unlearn.

we hold our closest stories to our vests until we see the whites of your eyes. we only tell in the flesh.

maybe we’re making a mistake.

we give our secrets too much power. especially when we live our lives in the glare of the internet: we release 98% of ourselves into the wild and hold back the lumpy bumpy 2% as if it were the Real Thing and we risk making it the Real Thing by treating it like a royal flush to be played when the stakes are highest.

i landed back in my own living room like Dorothy catapulted from a sleepless tornado of polyester and blond wigs, and the grind of housework and deadlines and two children who can’t seem to share the same space without talking at once landed on me like landfill. and i stared at Dave across the expanse of our couch wondering if there was anything about me he didn’t already know and if my real secret is that i’m dull and mundane and a stress monkey who’s actually 98% lumpy bumpy bits. and then i ranted for awhile.

a little bit of freedom is a dangerous weapon.

the truth about secrets, of course, is there are only so many. we live in bodies. they are vulnerable and beautiful. and we are petty and kind, clannish and magnanimous. we are not our secrets, nor just the sum of the parts we share. i knew this when i sat with you. i need to remember, when i sit with myself.

me. not me. mileage may vary.

Kate took more pictures of me in Toronto than i’ve been in since i had kids. to the self sitting here on my couch in dirty jeans, they are the secret, the hidden life. they are also only a story, a thin veneer. they are a promise of next time, and a nod that says, i see you, in your jeans and crumbs and deadlines and pretend secrets.

i wobble like the plane, landing, then coast back into my life.

he was eighteen. it was his second week of freshman year at a good university.

you’ve probably seen the story. Tyler Clementi‘s roommate set up a webcam in their dorm room that could be operated remotely, then livecast and tweeted Tyler’s sexual encounter with another guy. three days later Tyler jumped off the George Washington Bridge and drowned himself.

diminishment. shaming. the logic of dominance, our cultural hierachy of thought where one side of any societal binary – masculine/feminine, white/non-white, straight/gay, rational/emotional  – is legitimated in its power over the other, whatever Other it may be.

we exist in a social world, and sometimes we’re able to carve out spaces where we think we’re safe to be whoever we want or need to be. and then somebody else decides – out of discomfort, on a lark, to flex muscle or gain attention…nothing so different from all the little dehumanizations we perform on each other every day – to re-educate us about how the world really works and which kind of body or desire or way of being counts as legitimate, as Normal.

to invalidate whatever safe space we’ve created by taking the social power that the logic of dominance affords, and using it against us.

you will never feel safe so long as you’re subject to that logic, that operation of power over you. if you’re lucky, there is respite, retrenchment with those of your own kind, whatever that kind may be: the ones who make YOU feel normal, and valid, and deserving of human decency. hopefully reclamation of your right to respect.

but if that logic of dominance sneaks into your bedroom at night and broadcasts you at your most vulnerable, most exposed; if it treats your privacy a spectacle worthy of shame,  you might decide you’ll never feel safe again.
***

four weeks from today, i’ll be in Toronto at Blissdom Canada 2010, contributing to a panel called Blogging for Social Action, Community, and Empowerment: The Beauty of the Butterfly Effect. the good in social media. the advocacy and change that it makes possible. the beauty of this world out here created by a million – a billion? – hands.

until last week, my only real anxiety about it all was that part of my role on the panel is to talk about the creation and birth of Glow in the Woods, and i envisioned an audience expecting the lovely Kate – who is on a different panel – throwing squishy tomatoes at me. (that, and Erica Ehm. ERICA EHM is leading my panel. when i was 14, i wanted to BE Erica Ehm. eep.)

lately i’ve been grappling with some bigger doubts.

first there was the young woman in BC whose gang rape went viral on Facebook. then, Malcolm Gladwell published a piece in the New Yorker stating The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted, or that we’re all just armchair activists out here in social media land, frothing over with our expressions of “like” for good causes without putting any money where our mouths are, or doing much at all to effect real change.

in class, in a mostly-fascinating discussion over 20th-century thought from clever people who stand on the shoulders of giants: technology is bad, technology is reductive, technology is anti-humanist. it makes us nothing more than circuits for efficient information exchange.

i think i bleeped at that one, a cyborg afraid of being outed. but i wondered, too. Jesus. am i wrong?

then i came home last night and read about Tyler Clementi. and my heart cracked in two.
***

i don’t think we have the luxury of ignoring all this. not those of us invested and enmeshed in social media. these are not innocent tools we use, no matter how transformative or empowering they have been for us, no matter what safe spaces or advocacy or butterfly beauty they’ve made possible.

but. neither are the tools themselves cruel, or diminishing, or agents of the logic of dominance. unless they are used that way. they are just tools.

any story that tells you otherwise, whether it makes of them a mythology of salvation or a dystopia, is a lie.

social media amplifies all of our communicative powers, including the power to exclude and shame and victimize others, to gang up on them in masses and make them feel worthless and violated, or beyond the pale of belonging. it is just a tool, like a pen, except what we scrawl here is always public. what we scrawl here always has human effects and consequences.

i don’t know if Tyler Clementi’s roommate really, fully understood the scope of what he might be setting in motion, unleashing the brutality of the logic of dominance and shame out here in the amplified world. the power play behind his cruelty was a blatant smackdown of Tyler’s rights to respect and decency and equality, no matter the tools. had the roommate scrawled on the dorm room door with a pen the very same things he tweeted, he would likely have still caused terrible hurt, and probably uproar, and possibly incited danger to Tyler and his parter not from themselves but from others. but would Tyler have jumped from the bridge? or would he still have had – somewhere outside that dorm hall, or perhaps that campus – space for retreat and respite, for escape from the dehumanization and Othering?

with the amplification of voice that social media makes possible comes the amplification of the human effects that voice creates. and this is where i think Gladwell – and my learned colleagues and guides at the university, some of them – get it wrong.

yes, technology can be part of the modernist efficiency that diminishes all that cannot be represent in numbers and bottom lines; it can be a direct circuit that cuts out the warmth and messiness of human touch. but i live something far more than that. the idea of social media for good is more than a fairy tale wherein technology and Twitter make us all Cinderella. social media is revolutionary in that it creates a world where the struggling, messy, complex human self – the one the humanists are so afraid has been jettisoned forever by a Fordist, corporatist culture – has voice, on an unprecedented scale. and all of those voices have human effects.

some are ugly. some are tragic. some are life-changing in the most beautiful way possible. for me, the Internet has been a place to write myself into being after a loss that the so-called “real world” tends to silence, render unspeakable. social media brought me community, the company of my own kind, respite and resiliency in all the messiness of my sorrow and my survival.

those of us who speak for the good that technology & social media can do need to take ownership of its particular capacity for harm. there may be nothing more important to the education of the next generation than teaching kids that self-expression – whether it’s writing on a bathroom wall or on Twitter – has effects, and that those effects are what we live with, all of us, so long as we can bear them.

with social media technologies mostly banned from classrooms and curricula, that’s going to be hard.

the Revolution, if it comes, will not come from activists. it may come from those who still inhabit the Other Sides of the logic of dominance. or it may come in a quieter way, a change that is barely a revolution except in its core. one where in connecting with each other out here, we connect with our own humanity and that of others in ways that our modern society has made – til now – easier to just leave to the logic of dominance.

because it is only our humanity, not any tool under the sun, that will ever prevent another tragedy like that of Tyler Clementi.

i always wanted to be a Beat, a bohemian.

instead, suddenly i find myself  in the Business section of the bookstore, just an aisle over from Philosophy.

i hunker down, intent, studying the titles on the shelves with the rabid eyes of a shark looking to game the casino. i am giving myself a personal, experiential education in How To Maybe Write a Bestseller About Ideas and Social Media. go hard or go home, they say where i’m from.

i has me a literary agent.

i pinch myself.

all these years of dreaming of being discovered for my sizzling cool. instead, i stoop in the Business aisle, plotting the story of self as brand in the world of social media. a dissertation and a trade book. book first. with capital letters, cold hard ambition you can lay out on a table like a cadaver and dissect.

it is the story of how people with my artsy-fartsy prejudices and my humanities degrees and my bohemian posturings are – thanks to the way social media works – ending up in the Business section of the bookstore. it is also the story of how business itself is – for the same reasons inverted – becoming more literary and humanities-focused in its discourse and processes. the unholy marriage of never the twain shall meet, indeed.

it is, in the end, the story of the reputational and relational economy of the digital.

it is the story of brand as a personal rather than a corporate attribute; as a brave new world of identity. brand is not the sell, nor is it without soul. i LOVE this shit.

Allen Ginsberg, i think, would wink at me. or maybe hoist himself up on a soapbox and rail, soliloquize, erase me with the scope of his supermarket excursions. i bow to his shadow in either case, and smile.

i feel like Alice down the rabbit hole. you see that vial labelled Drink Me? hand it over.
***
i want help, though.

it’s a shameless kind of want, the same kind of shameless i always imagined would see me perched with my folk guitar outside some far-flung library strumming Dylan songs, the really long ones, with my guitar case with the embroidered Grateful Dead bears open for donations and a handwritten sign, If you Fear Change, leave it here. life takes you funny places.

instead i sit here in my hometown hoping you’ll tell me stories…yours. or those you think might resonate. i need a few case studies, poster children whose selves and brands i can explore and dissect.

i want to know, in these stories, about how the so-called real and the online self.  about how you and your virtual identity get along. i want to know if the lines between them have changed for you, over the time you’ve spent engaging online.

you don’t need to be a Big Deal to tell me about your “brand” and yourself. you don’t need to like the idea of brand at all. in fact, i might like it a lot if you didn’t.

you can email me, if you want, or leave as many comments here as you want. i may pry further. i may come and park myself on your floor and read your virtual Tarot cards like some social media fortune teller, promising the inevitable dark, handsome stranger and a future of millions of Twitter followers. i may offer my effusive thanks in the acknowledgements of something printed on paper, someday, knock wood. that something may be a Ph.D thesis or a tome you can buy on Amazon and in the Business aisles of better bookstores, or both.

either way. i am sitting, waiting for the story hour to begin.

all those years i dragged myself through Korean and Slovak and Turkish streets at dawn not looking for an angry fix but another drink, a smoke, a conversation to be in, arms or words there was something transcendental out there burning for the ancient heavenly connection, i knew it, i saw it in tatters and hollowed eyes and tenement roofs illuminated. but in the end, i came home and found it here, in the ether.

and so i laugh and burn my beret, and ask what you think it means to be a self in the world of social media?
***
edited to add: if not your story, whose? who should i be tracking down to explore success in social media and ways it intersects with personal identity? who’s your idea of an exceptional, or reluctant, or conflicted, or interesting “brand”? even if they’d never use the word themselves? and who or what (feel free to email rather than comment, as you wish) make up the benighted practices reinforcing the concept of personal branding as some kind of Amway Cult of Personality? all recommendations gratefully received.

i might even buy you a beer to keep you talking.