My New Business Site

In early 2000, I started my own consulting business. I had worked for a number of companies, but I was leaving one as part of a downsizing and I simply wasn’t ready to go to another. So I started my own consulting business. Three years later, I was hired by St. Louis Public Schools as the director of communications, and the following year went back to the corporate world.

My consulting business continued, in a small way. Occasionally I would be asked to write a speech for someone; I was a writer, editor and then Twitter manager for The High Calling; and I was an editor at Tweetspeak Poetry.

I had a “postcard” web site for the consulting business – essentially one page with a phone number and email address. This summer, that changed. With the help of The Willingham Enterprise (aka Lyla Lindquist and company), I now have a new business site, GlynnYoung.com.

It’s part blog, part links for communications news and resources, and part links for faith and work. Lyla did a wonderful job with the design and IT stuff (I will always call it “IT stuff); I couldn't be more pleased. Take a look and let me know what you think. I plan to blog weekly at the new site, and likely slightly less here at Faith, Fiction, Friends.

Book Discussion at Tweetspeak Poetry

The book discussion on my book Poetry at Work got underway today, with a post by Lyla Lindquist, “The Poetry of the Workspace.” Tweetspeak also posted an excerpt from the Introduction.

Today’s discussion covers chapters 1 through 7 (not as formidable as it sounds because the chapters are short). Here’s the schedule for the rest of the month:

January 15: Chapters 8 – 12
January 22: Chapters 13 – 20

As part of the discussion, Jody Lee Collins posted an article on Poetry at Work at her blog, Three Way Light.

And don’t forget, next Tuesday, Jan. 14, is Poetry at Work Day –here’s a cool infographic that tells you all about it, along with resources ideas for a table.

Saturday Good Reads: Slowing Down

This week didn’t start out in Frantic Mode – we first had to dig out from a 12-inch snow that arrived Sunday. (A huge thank you to the young man who knocked on our door Monday and asked if we needed our driveway shoveled.)

Then on Tuesday, as if to prove exercise is bad for you, I was riding the stationary bike at 6 a.m. prior to my workout with the personal trainer when a partial bridge in my mouth decided to relocate. So – it was pray that the dentist had some space to squeeze me in (he did).

And at work, a situation that had started the previous week was continuing to build, and build some more, until the tsunami arrived on Thursday, and ebbed only slightly by Friday afternoon. I finally had to stop Thursday night (Friday morning?) about 12:15 a.m.; I decided the crisis would be waiting for me when I woke up. It was.

What helped was watching a few Netflix videos and finding a few oases of calm in the online world, like the Saturday Good Reads below.

First, four poems.

Two by Steven Marty Grant at Urbanality, whose poetry always seems to transport me to New York City: Winter in Midtown and God Looks Down.

One by Chris Yokel, whose music I like as much as his poetry: Green Arms (A Good Friday Poem).

And one by Brian Miller, whom I first met at One Stop Poetry when it was going gangbusters and who’s now one of the movers behind dVersePoets: I’ll have the usual.

Am I the only person who reads poetry when things get crazy?

Then over at Slow Church, John Pattison posted a reflection on the novel Silence by Shasaku Endo, in honor of Endo’s birthday. I had read the novel three years ago (and even blogged about it a few times). Pattison’s article is well worth reading.

David Mathis at Desiring God did something unexpected and truly beautiful. He visited and interviewed the 96-year-old theologian Robert Duncan Culver, and came away with The Old Man and His Big Book.

I was rather awed by Culver and his razor-sharp mind, and I was also awed by something slightly older – a graffiti found during a 19^th century excavation of the Palantine Hill in Rome. Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming wrote about it in The History of Christianity in 25 Objects: the Alexamenos Graffito.

I learned something new on Friday. Lyla Lindquist, one of my colleagues over at Tweetspeak Poetry, has more than a slight interest in the Spanish language, and wrote about it in The Poetics of Learning (and Loving) Language.

And then John Blase at The Beautiful Due wrote one of the most original articles I’ve seen about Easter: What Do I Know?

Finally, Greg Sullivan at Sippican Cottage posted a short video the likes of which I’ve never seen. Well, I take that back. I’ve seen the actor Kenneth Branagh do it, but I’ve never seen the “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V by William Shakespeare performed like it is by this young actor.

Photograph by Jean Sander via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Assassin’s Lament

At TweetSpeak Poetry, we’ve arrived at the last weekly discussion of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. Our discussion leader Lyla Lindquist has bravely led us through a veritable forest of counsel, advice and assignments for not only writing poetry, but it writing it better, writing it well, and even applying what we learn to all kinds of writing.

It’s a book that’s well worth your while to read.

This last section is entitled “Toward mastery,” so you know the assignments are going to get really serious. Here were but a few of the possible writing assignments we could undertake (and Addonizio thinks we should do them all):

Write a sonnet (remember that old iambic pentameter your English teacher talked about in high school? Well, it’s time to dust the iambs off.)

Write a deliberately bad sonnet (which, in my case, might not be difficult at all).

Do a close reading of a poem you love.

Perform your poem (as in, stand up in front of a live audience and read your poem and perhaps perform it). (That’s what I want to do – make a spectacle of myself.)

Make a broadside (like a one-page ad or tract or sheet with your poem on it, complete with drawings or art or designs). (I’m almost as bad an artist as I am a designer.)

Collaborate on a poem. (Possible; I’ve actually done something like that with TweetSpeak Poetry. It’s called a Twitter poetry jam, and you should try it sometimes.)

I decide I would write a sonnet. And I developed an idea that I borrowed from some fictional work in progress that just might see the light of day in about four or five weeks. The form is the traditional English sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg) (and those pesky iambs pentametering around the place).

I’ll let you decide if I wrote a sonnet or a deliberately bad sonnet (hint: both answers may be correct).

The Assassin’s Lament

So much of each assignment was a bore,

to wait, to watch, to think a plan straight through;

of all the skills required to do the chore,

to see the time was right was clearest cue.

And so he watched the pair so deep in love:

a golden boy with fame so broad, so far,

a golden girl with face from far above;

he felt regret and rued this bloody war.

The day arrived when he was told to act;

the wait was done, the price was paid to kill;

a plan of vengeance to become a fact,

his role, his fate he knew he must fulfill.

He’d watched too long, he’d seen the love so shared;

His heart of ice did melt, for now he cared.

To see what Lyla is up to and if any other iambs are roaming out there, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.

Necessary Coldness

I’ve completed the revisions to the manuscript of A Light Shining, the sequel to my novel Dancing Priest. The basic structure and concept of the original manuscript is there, but the finished story turns out to be something different, and it is due primarily to two things: a dramatic shortening of what had been the final section (dramatic as in a reduction of some 10,000 words; some will be saved for other projects); and the creation of a new character.

The new character doesn’t have a large role, but he does have a sufficient role, and it lasts throughout the story. In creating the character and the scenes he appears in, I did something I didn’t know there was a name for – necessary coldness.

In Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, author Kim Addonizio describes the technique of  “writing it colder,” which is a way (or technique) to handle emotion on the page, a deliberate underwriting or stripping out of emotion that actually has the opposite effect. She quotes a letter by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

“When you want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold…the more objective you are the stronger will be the impression you make.”

Pity is not the emotion I am aiming for with this new character. It is something altogether different. I introduced the character in a blog post entitled “Watching” in August, and also mentioned him a little later in “Where did he come from?”

But the idea of coldness permeates the scenes in the book with this character. And by writing the emotion down, I believe the reader’s emotion is dialed up. When I went back (several times; make that numerous times) to reread those scenes, I kept rereading and rewriting, and rerwriting in the direction of less is more.

By the time the manuscript was finished, I understood what I had done. When I read the section in Addonizio’s book, I realized there was name for it – necessary coldness.

I would tell you this character’s name except he doesn’t have one.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, LylaLindquist has been leading a discussion of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius. This week we’re covering Part III – “The poem’s progress.” While she’s focused on poetry, what she’s writing – and the exercises you can do – apply broadly to all kinds of writing. To see what’s up with the discussion, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.

Sign of the Harvest Moon

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, we’re finishing up Part One of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio. Our intrepid leader, Lyla Lindquist, has encouraged us to do as many of the exercises as possible. “As possible” is the operative word here, because there are plenty of exercises in Part one.

Addonizio tells the story of a fellow writing seminar teacher taking one photograph a day for the 12 days of the seminar, and then writing about it. Addonizio suggested doing one a day for five days, and then describing why we took it.

I took one photograph for one day. Close enough.

How the photo happened: I would like to say I was trying to experience the evening, attempting to soak up some inspiration for writing. Actually, I was putting the garbage out – real garbage, recyclables and yard waste. I looked up, and saw the full moon almost directly above the stop sign at the end of our street. Out came the smart phone. Click. And I had the photo.

The question became, what to do with it. It’s been sitting on my smart phone for a month, and we recently had another full moon, which reminded me of the photo.

As I read through the rest of Part One of Ordinary Genius, I read the section on rhythm and flow, and how a poem needs to sound “poetic.” So I started playing with the photo, and the idea of the harvest moon, and that stop sign, and this was the result:

Sign of the Harvest Moon

It shimmers in a blackened sky

mantled with a misty crown,

iconic figure of harvest end,

the time to lay the reaper down.

It soothes, it does, in its cloak

of pale shades, its iris eye;

it gazes on sleeping lights below,

willing the day to stop, to die.

Well, it’s not one for the anthologies, but it has a rhythm and rather poetic flow to it.

The fact is, I don’t usually write this kind of poetry (poetry that rhymes). But it is a good way to practice the sounds of poetry, and the flow, and how it contains movement.

Please visit TweetSpeak Poetry to see what Lyla Lindquist is up to today with the book discussion. And don’t tell her I only did one photograph instead of five. And that it was a month old, taken before I knew I would be doing the exercise.

Saturday Good Reads – TweetSpeak Poetry

Little did I know that when I improvised a short poem (contained within one tweet on Twitter) back in 2009 that it would me to a regular Twitter poetry jam; editing the tweets from the jams into poems; a blog created to contain the poems; other stuff (reviews and features) being added to the blog; and then a business enterprise that goes by the name of TweetSpeak Poetry.

Currently, I’m a weekly columnist for TweetSpeak (Tuesdays) and one of the things – just one – we’re up to is beginning to get our heads around the idea of poetry and business. I do reviews of poetry books, reflections, recollections, whatever sounds interesting.

I love being a columnist.

I work with a terrific team, led by chief instigator, central plotter, primary conspirator, writer, editor, publisher, poet, mother, wife, blogger, tea expert, lighthouse climber and who-knows-what-else Laura Barkat. Laura, or L.L., is the Grand Poobah of TweetSpeak (that sounds like a title from a Gilbert & Sullivan musical opera). She has three blogs: Seedlings in Stone, Love Notes to Yahweh, and Green Inventions Central.

She’s also written a memoir, Stone Crossings; a book of spiritual exercises, God in the Yard; a book of poems, Inside/Out; and a novella, The Novelist.

The editor for TweetSpeak is Lyla Lindquist, who is not only editor but also chief publicist, social media captain, writer, promoter, columnist, book club discussion leader and skunk works leader. Lyla is here, there and everywhere, and all at once. What she’s capable of doing leaves me in awe. She blogs at A Different Story, and also has a collection of reports and meditations about weekly visits to a Benedictine monastery for six months, called Making Headroom.

Then there’s Claire Burge. Claire is young (at my age, virtually everyone I know is young) but knows everything and how to do everything. She knew about Pinterest before Pinterest knew about Pinterest. She takes beautiful photographs (I used one for the cover of my novel Dancing Priest, and will be using another for an upcoming novella), travels to exotic places, knows everything about social media, and lets nothing intimidate her. She blogs at Claire Burge.

Monica Sharman has an official title of Editorial Intern, but she’s all over poetry, all over the business of poetry, all over our poetry jams on Twitter. Monica blogs at Know-Love-Obey God about faith, family, poetry and writing. She’s also a contributing writer to online publications like Bibledude.

Tania Runyan is a columnist for TweetSpeak, and is also a published poet, with three books of poetry: A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air. Her poems have been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and she received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011. Tania is a tutor, writer, gardener and fiddle and mando player. Her web site: Tania Runyan.

Charity Singleton, another contributing writer, is a poet, writer, blogger, and works in online media for her Midwestern employer. She blogs at Wide Open Spaces, and I have to say it’s one of my favorite blogs to read.

And then there’s my friend Seth Haines. Seth is an attorney (but a nice guy in spite of that); he and his wife Amber are raising four boys in Arkansas. Seth is a writer, poet, and sometime theologian. He writes TweetSpeak’s weekly poetry prompt on Mondays. Seth blogs at Seth Haines.

TweetSpeak Poetry is a fine group of people – and a fine group of writers. Despite its origins as a place to deposit poems from poetry jams, it has become a presence in the field of poetry, and has plans to become even more.

With Apologies to Mr. Frost

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is starting a new book discussion today – Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio. Today’s assignment: Read Part 1 (roughly the first 95 pages) and do as many of the exercises as possible.

There are enough writing exercises in Part 1 to keep a normal person busy for at least three months. The book is packed with simple and not-so-simple exercises you can do to help you with your writing. While the focus is poetry, the exercises actually apply to writing broadly.

I combined two of the exercises. I took the first line of a well known poem (it won’t be hard to guess which one) and imagined it going in another direction. That’s one exercise. The second: before I wrote the first word, I left the room. And I really left the room – going on a 20-mile bike ride along a trail that includes two longish stretches of woods. As I biked, I worked the first line into another first line, and then into the framework of a poem, and then into a rough draft of a poem. This was the result:

Post-Modern Man

Whose woods these are I do not know;

I vainly search for a village, though,

or even a single house but find

only woods, foreboding and forming

a filtered canopy over what may not

be a path through but only into.

With a touch of frost upon my face,

the proprietor, if he is, sends his minions

to effect the changing of the guard of leaves,

the red and the gold taking

the place of the green and fading.

I pause to rest against a tree,

and hear his whispers in my sleep,

and hear his whispers in my sleep.

“When I started to write poetry,” Addonizio says, “I had no idea how to begin to learn about it.” I had been reading poetry for more than 25 years before I thought of writing any poems myself. I didn’t think about learning to write poetry; I was reading poetry to help me become a better speechwriter. And yet those 25 years were a kind of learning time or preparation.

And then, in 2009, I started writing it. With a general sense of terror, I eventually posted a poem on this blog.

Like Addonzio, I’ve written a lot of bad poems, and some not-so-bad, and a few really good ones. And I’ve broadened the poetry I read, and now read as much contemporary poetry as I do poetry from the “canon.” The poetry I feel a particular affinity for is the poetry from the modern period, roughly 1900 to 1950 – poets like T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sara Teasdale and others. I suspect it has to do with the fact that these were the first poets I was taught in high school, and the poets who had most influenced my English and literature teachers.

Consider joining us with the discussion. Or simply stop by TweetSpeak and see what’s happening.

Fiction Grounded in Reality

“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.”

                              Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

A few months back, my wife told me something that startled me. “Your book,” she said, referring to Dancing Priest, “is filled with you.”

I was surprised because (1) I’ve never been in the Olympics, (2) I do ride a bike but have never raced, (3) I am not an ordained priest or even a member of the Anglican Church, (4) I met my wife in very different circumstances than Michael Kent met Sarah Hughes, and (5) I don’t know how to tango. A quick glance says there’s very little about me that is obviously in the book, with one significant exception: how one character comes to faith is based very closely on my own experience.

So her comment at first didn’t make much sense. And then I reread it, and discovered she was right. The fiction that is Dancing Priest is grounded in reality – a reality that’s very familiar.

And more than that, the sequel manuscript is as well. I’ve been editing – wrestling is a better word – the manuscript, and I’m realizing that it, too, is grounded in a familiar reality. So are the other manuscripts in the series (if it goes that far). So is the poetry I write. And the novel manuscript that’s completely different from what I’ve done so far. And the extended outline for still another novel. And the novella I’ve been working on, which is still unfinished but I have a really cool photo by Claire Burge for the cover.

Reading over everything I’ve done, I’ve learned there are some consistent themes, also grounded in that familiar reality.

The desire to create something exceptional.

How that desire faces circumstances or people standing in the way.

Unknown, unexpected forces or people becoming actively involved, without one’s awareness.

A belief that all will come right, even if not in this life.

The reality of faith, and the conflict it evokes.

These themes play through Dancing Priest and its sequel; through six more manuscripts behind it; through a manuscript totally unrelated to Dancing Priest; and the novella.

All of the themes are grounded in a reality I’m more than familiar with.

Nonetheless, it is still surprising. I thought I had made all of this stuff up. It turns out I hadn’t. Not really.

Led by Lyla Lindquist, we’re discussing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity over at TweetSpeak Poetry. This week’s discussion covers chapters 4 and 5 – “Recovering a Sense of Integrity” and “Recovering a Sense of Possibility.” The main article at TweetSpeak will post on Wednesday.

Logic-Survivor-Artist Brain

I’m reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. TweetSpeak Poetry is starting a discussion series tomorrow on it. The book, now 20 years old, is about creativity, artist’s block, and how to break artist’s block, and structured over a 12-week course.

Knowing our discussion leader Lyla Lindquist, I expect we will take a little less time than 12 weeks. Like maybe six. Tomorrow’s discussion ill cover the “introductory sections” and the first of 12 lessons. “Introductory sections” is a specific phrase. Lyla did not say “introduction.” She said “introductory sections” for a good reason – those sections cover 15 percent of the book (and my Kindle knows). These sections are of critical importance to the rest of the book, because they include your daily and weekly assignments.

Bah! More work! Who cares?

Well, I do. This may be some of the most important work I’ve done.

Part of what’s included in the introductory material is the “three brains” we deal with in life – Logic Brain, Survivor Brain, and Artist’s Brain. How many places have I worked where Logic Brain and Survivor Brain (doing only what’s known or safe) institutionally gang up on Artist Brain to kill off even small lurches toward creativity? And how many places have I worked there that turned out to be a terrible mistake?

The answer to both questions is the same. It’s not that Artist Brain is necessarily superior to the other two; I suspect all three are needed in any organization. But when faced with an overwhelming challenge, Logic Brain and Survivor Brain rarely come up with a solution.

Those three brains may explain most of my professional career.

In 1992, email had finally reached critical mass in the organization here I was working. We proposed doing an email newsletter for employees. The people responsible for our email system predicted the end of western civilization if we published even a text-only email newsletter. The discussions went on for months, until I realized that, short of shutting down the system, no one could really stop the newsletter. We launched our newsletter, and nothing happened to the system. Western civilization survived.

Three years later, something similar happened with the organization’s first web site. Western civilization once again survived.

Organizations, even artistic organizations, aren’t by nature kind to Artist Brain. Organizations tend to take on their own dynamic, and perpetuation of the status quo can become paramount, even when the status quo is falling apart and something new is called for.

Julia Cameron (not to mention Lyla Lindquist) would be amused to see how far I’ve already moved from creativity and artist’s block, and this is just the first week. I plan on having another post on Thursday on the first lesson – “Recovering a Sense of Safety.”

Come join us at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Writing Habits

I’m editing and rewriting a manuscript right now, the sequel to Dancing Priest. The characters are mostly the same but the story moves in a very different direction. I think of it as an ongoing love story – but one engulfed by world events.

I read the manuscript straight through this past weekend, when we took a few days off and spent time at Lake of the Ozarks. We had a large room, with a living room and kitchen, and I read in the early morning hours while my wife slept in.

Like its predecessor, this manuscript reads quickly. It has about the same amount of emotional scenes; a couple of times my wife woke up and wandered into the kitchen area to find me sniffling. (Is it okay to cry when you read your own stories?).

I have a lot on my writing plate right now, this manuscript being the most important and time-consuming. It’s the “big” project of the moment, but not the only one:

•  A novella that started when I watched a YouTube video.
• A weekly column for TweetSpeak Poetry.
•  A bimonthly column for The Master's Artist.
• A monthly article (and some stuff) for The High Calling.
•  Ongoing marketing for Dancing Priest.
• Several novels in varying stages of completion.
• Blogging.

And, yes. I do have a full-time job, too.

It seems overwhelming, and it would be overwhelming, except that I’ve made it work together. And I find I’m managing my time better than I ever have before.

In Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity and Writing, L.L. Barkat cites several principles to “cultivate and protect” one’s creative center: have goals; rest on a weekly basis; coose writer friends carefully; choose share-timing wisely ( watch whom you share your writing with, how much you share and at what point you share it); and watch for siphons – those projects and things that will drain time and energy away.

I’ve surprised myself with how closely I’ve been following these guidelines.

Two of the columns I write are about poetry, which I’ve been a lot of for years. Reading poetry is a focusing kind of activity for me.

Blog posts are often extensions of other work – what doesn’t fit in a column for The High calling may become a blog post, for example. I waste what I write very sparingly, and very little is ever useless. I keep a lot of things I don’t use immediately for future use. Not much is subject to the delete button.

A lot of what I do could become siphons, except I’ve focused them in a particular way.

All of these writing activities are helping the main project – the manuscript. Writing a poem helps focus my mind, and has even solved a problematic section in the text more than once.

I haven’t shared the manuscript with anyone yet (“choose share-timing wisely!”), and I won’t until I’m satisfied that it’s ready to be read.

And sometimes I rest. Or play.

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is leading us in a discussion of Rumors of Water. The main discussion will post on Wednesday. 

A Kind of Madness: "The Heart Aroused," Part 1

I first read David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America when it was first published in 1994. I was occupying one of those “high watermarks” in my career, having helped create an environmental revolution in the chemical industry; writing speeches for a CEO whose words were recognized, admired, quoted and reprinted; successfully undertaken the transition of employee communications to new electronic technology; and preparing to create the company’s first web site – one of the first corporate web sites in the manufacturing industry.

I read The Heart Aroused, and I remember the shock of recognition, and even a sudden chill. With my team, I had gone through an incredible burst of creativity, and it had helped to unleash profound change within the company and within our industry. But alongside that creativity was a growing feelings that people, processes and the status quo were being threatened.

We launched the corporate web site. One of its most popular features was a weekly cartoon (which back then took forever to load on the computer). It humanized the company in a way nothing else quite could. Employees loved it. Human Resources didn’t.

The CEO retired about the time we launched the site, and it was sooner than expected. His successor, like new CEOS like to do, started making changes. The changes to the business weren’t that unusual, but within five years they led to the company being split, merged and acquired. But the changes to internal management and the management of people became an all-out assault on the company culture.

What came was a kind of madness.

Staff functions were reorganized into the latest business fad – shared services. Staff functions were expected to be profit centers, selling their services to the business units. To my knowledge, only one team managed to succeed – mine. We hired a PR firm to teach us how to be a PR firm. I had to go out and sell, which I did. I will not forget the expression on my boss’s face when I told him I had sold enough business to cover the cost of my team and to hire five additional people.

We were successful; most teams weren’t. The reorganization created significant chaos, and a lot of work simply stopped. The concept was finally abandoned when the CEO decided to spin off a significant portion of the company. As that was planned, some of the most bizarre corporate behavior I had ever experienced was occurring.

Imagine 300 senior executives at a retreat, directed by a consultant to sit on the floor to play a game with Legos.

Imagine spirit teams wandering the corridors, looking for people to celebrate and sing to.

Imagine a room set aside in the executive office building for meditation, opening to any and all employees but you needed to bring your own meditation pillow.

Imagine people being paid as full-time employees to lead a one-hour discussion a week on novels.

Imagine people being told to work on whatever they found interesting – even if it was someone else’s job and responsibility.

Imagine a decision to eliminate the corporate archives, because someone wanted the physical space the archives occupied.

Imagine a corporate speechwriter telling a secretary to get the vice chairman out of a meeting so the archives could be saved. Imagine that speechwriter – in his business suit – climbing into a large dumpster to rescue archived photo files that had already been trashed.

Whyte’s book helped me make sense of what was happening. The changes did unleash a lot of creativity, but they also unleashed something Whyte talks about in his book – the darkness where creativity lives. Because with creativity come our fears and phobias.

The company eventually split, merged and was acquired. The madness (and those singing spirit teams) came to an end. There had been a lot of creative destruction, accompanied by a lot of destruction of creativity.

I found myself washed up on the shore of the spun-off company, and two years later washed up on the shore of a downsizing. Like a lot of other people, I learned that cultural change can also be matched by utterly ruthless people grabbing what they want and prevailing, even if for a short time.

Many of the really good, creative things my team had done were destroyed. A few things (like the archives) were saved. Other things did outlast our version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Surrounded by chaos, fear, ruthlessness, meanness, and a few examples of heroism, I was forced to confront and define what was important to me. I would turn away from corporate life for almost five years. In the middle of that period, I started envisioning a story – a story that became a manuscript and finally a published novel.

But the creativity that could have been utilized in a corporate context was channeled in another direction.

On Wednesday at TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist will begin a weekly discussion of David Whyte’s The Heart Aroused. You can read the prompt here. Because of the importance the book has played in my own career and development, I will have three posts this week: this introduction today, a post on Beowulf on Tuesday; and a meditation on the heart on Thursday.

This post is also being submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival hosted by Peter Pollock. The word for this carnival is madness, and the links will be live on Tuesday.