It’s rough getting winter storm warnings in autumn. The kids were out of school yesterday, with inclement weather days chipping away at their summer break before we even get to December.
But ice sure is pretty.
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Little bluestem grass encased in ice Two berries in an ice pod Icicles are always fun Iced dogwood berries Glad I didn’t cut back the hydrangea -
A few years ago, I wrote about research that suggests literary fiction helps us understand one another. In making a concerted effort to read beyond the authors I typically read, I think now it’s not just literary fiction that helps us understand one another: it’s diversity of perspectives.
With my Andrea Reads America project, I’m reading women, men, and authors of color from every state in the US. Reading this way has made me realize how narrow a point of view I read previously (primarily white & straight, usually male authors), and therefore how narrow an understanding I had of the world. Even of myself as a woman. In both pleasure reading and reading for school, I read thousands of pages in which women didn’t even appear except to serve men. Prostitutes. Mothers who appeared to feed and pamper their sons. Adoring girlfriends and wives who were removed from the scene when the real action, the real story, the transformation of characters took place. Likewise, people of color rarely made appearances, and if they did, it was as inferiors, as people to be mocked, insulted, or feared.
As a woman I rarely saw anyone who looked like me doing anything interesting in the classics and the literary fiction I read. Women and people of color were secondary, powerless, and were often insignificant enough to be omitted completely.
As a result, I overlooked their perspectives.
My reading project has changed that. Intentionally reading a diversity of authors has brought those discounted stories forward. This has been a powerful experience. I’ve been exposed to perspectives that were easy to ignore without reading their stories. I feel heart-wrenching sadness, and oftentimes rage, on behalf of native Americans, African Americans, immigrants, and women.
The mothers are afraid to have more children, for fear they shall have daughters, who are not safe even in their mother’s presence.
— Life Among the Piutes by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, published 1883
I stopped reading in disgust when the paper said that the police didn’t use clubs or pistols against the rioters. If that wasn’t a billy club that cop used on that colored man’s head, then I was stone blind.
— Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Merriweather, published 1970
Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.
Let ‘im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.— The Color Purple by Alice Walker, published 1982
Bethel Jenkins, his mama, had raised no fool. Jenkins had sense enough not to wear his best suit or his best shoes down to the police station to see Michael Cronin. Clean and slightly threadbare — that was the best way to dress for talking to the white folks.
— River Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke, published 1999
It is not mine, she thinks, this blue and gold Indiana morning. None of it is for me. Between the flat land and the broad sky, she feels ground down to the grain, erased. She feels as if, were she to scream in this place, some Indiana mute button would be on, and no one would hear.
— The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf, published 2006
It was easier to let him keep on touching me than to ask him to stop, easier to let him inside than push him away, easier than hearing him ask me, Why not? It was easier to keep quiet and take it than to give him an answer.
— Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, published 2011
We’re the unknown Americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them. And who would they hate then?
— The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henriquez, published 2014
The gift of art is that it opens our eyes to the reality that surrounds us every day but that we might not see. Fiction can show us the experiences people who are not like us, and hold a mirror for those who are. Fiction can awaken us. I am humbled by the stories I’ve read. They are not long-ago history. They are the very real backstory to our societal norms, and they are inexcusable in our past and in our present.
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Dear Swimming,
As much as I complain about you — about the middle of the night wakeups, about the cost, about the 3-day swim meets where we spend 18 hours at the pool for 12 minutes of our daughter swimming — I love you dearly.
I abandoned you for many years. I used a tread desk for exercise when I got a full time job. Fitness was more efficient that way: I could exercise and work at the same time. I walked and typed and walked and typed and walked and had video calls.
When the treadmill died, I panicked about how I was going to fit exercise in. When the treadmill died, I also realized what a rut I was in. I rarely left my office. I rarely changed my perspective. I was always upright, always had access to air.
At the time, my husband was bringing our daughter to the pool for her early morning practices. It occurred to me that she is at the pool four days a week anyway — maybe that’s how I could get my exercise in: I could swim while she swims.
Now I’m swimming again, and how I missed you. I love using my shoulders and my hands to pull myself through blue water, like I’m flying, but through liquid. I love the murmur of bubbles by my ear as I exhale. I love the quiet of my mind in the pool. It’s so blessedly inactive I can barely even count laps. You are the closest I have ever come to meditating. Sometimes when thoughts do sneak in — thoughts other than how to move my arms or time my kick — the thoughts are of diving off the bow of our sailboat into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean one day when we retire. I’ll take my exercise in the sea surrounding our floating home.
I love the ocean, and you bring me closer to it.
But it’s not just for me that I love you. I love you for our daughter. As a sport, you are one of the healthiest I’ve encountered. There are rarely screaming sideline parents. The kids set personal goals that they have agency over — they are not dependent on others on the team to do their jobs, they are in charge of their own performance. They compete against their own times. You teach them discipline, you teach them commitment. They have pride in getting up before the world to practice (and they are adorable all sleepy eyed and bed-headed, waiting for the aquatic center staff to unlock the door at 5:30am). You allow boys and girls on the team to intermingle in a way I don’t see in other sports — they are together and friends rather than separated and avoiding each other. Something about that seems very healthy to me.
You’ve taught our daugher confidence and dedication. She is active because of you. She eats healthier because of you. She wants to be strong because of you. She improves because of you. She is part of a team because of you.
The sun hasn’t risen yet and I’ve already swum and showered. Our daughter continues her set in the pool below, sharing a lane with her best friend. We’ve been up since 4:40am, like we are every Wednesday and Friday. Some people hate mornings. I love them though. I love being up before the world, getting in a workout, and sitting in the bleachers afterwards, eating my yogurt and walnuts from a thermos while the sun rises. The whole day, the rest of my life, stretches out before me. And I want you in it.
Andrea
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Last winter I obsessed over the garden. I scoured seed catalogs, bought graph paper to design flower beds, stood at the back door staring at the bare hill and tried to visualize what it would look like with plants on it.
Now that everything is dead and gardening season is over, I wanted to take a look at the gardens’ transformation through the months.
Back garden
Back hill, marked for flower beds. February 2018 
Forsythia in bloom, March 18, 2018 
Back hill, March 25, 2018 
Back hill after transplanting plants from front garden. April 21, 2018 
Moved more plants from out front. May 21, 2018 
Bought some plants, others filling in, seedlings starting to grow. June 17, 2018 
Flowers blooming, weeds proliferating. July 2018 
As filled in as it’s going to get. Late August, 2018 
Peak. Some things starting to fade. Early September, 2018. 
Time to clear out spent stems. October, 2018. 
I need to rake leaves for compost. November, 2018. Front bed
February. So sad. 
Moved some plants, sowed some seeds. Bought new perennials. May 2018. 
Starting to flower, including seeds I sowed. July 2018. 
Wrong angle, but the only August shot I have. 
Early September. 
October 2018 
November 😭 Now I can study these photos all winter to see where I want to change things. I’ve already got a seed catalog stashed away for a snowy day.
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I have been told that it takes about six months to start feeling competent in a new role: to know where to look for things, to make decisions on your own, and to feel like maybe your employer didn’t make a mistake in hiring you. This was true for me in my job as a Happiness Engineer — at six months I felt like Ok, I can do this. When I became a team lead and mentored new hires, I comforted them with the same prediction.
Four months into my new role in operations, I wasn’t sure if that would be the case.
When I first began at Support Driven, we were in the midst of planning our biggest conference of the year, Support Driven Expo in Portland, Oregon. My job was straightforward for the first three months: execute the conference. If there’s anything I know I can do, it’s get in there and get shit done. In the back of my mind, I knew there would be harder things to do later. I didn’t have time to think them through, though, and I mostly pushed them aside.
Expo was a success. More than 400 people attended, we offered 76 talks and workshops, and we managed to get through the event without any major catastrophes. Attendees shared positive feedback, appreciated the practical lessons they were able to implement at work, and offered useful suggestions for how to improve next year.
During Expo planning, I didn’t think much about whether I could do my job, I just did it. In the weeks after, I wasn’t as sure. Once Expo was over, the work to do next was brand new to me: define organizational core values, write event-planning playbooks that had enough detail to get the job done but not so much that the manuals became overwhelming, bake in quality assurance so we can know at a glance if things are on track, think about the organization of the organization, make decisions about internal communication structures, make decisions about what direction to take the organization, write job descriptions, interview, hire, decline, negotiate, document, document, document.
I had days where I questioned my ability. I questioned if I had enough experience to do this job. I questioned if I was as good at organizing as I thought I was. I questioned if I was firm enough, nice enough, visionary enough, if I was doing the right work, thinking about things the right way, accomplishing what Scott was hoping for when he hired me.
After writing my first job description and making my first hire, which I knew was a good one — hi SarahB! — I started feeling more confident. Sarah, who had helped organize WordCamp US, took the wheel for our next event, Support Driven Leadership Summit. I documented a ton of event-planning information after Expo, and we handed it over to Sarah to start testing its efficacy.
With Sarah steering Summit, I started working with the community to plan for our next event, Support Driven Expo Europe: finding a city and venue, spinning up the website, writing timelines, writing a job description for its coordinator. Also, since Summit was in Sarah’s competent hands, Scott and I were able to start digging into some of the broader organizational questions we needed to explore: how can we best serve the Support Driven community? How do we need to hire to accomplish our goals? What do we need to do first?
Now, seven months in, and especially with Expo and Summit succeeding as valuable events for attendees — Summit sold out a month ahead of time! — I’m starting to feel competent. We’re getting things out of our heads and into documentation, we’ve improved and defined our hiring process, we’ve clarified our purpose and our core values as an organization, and we know what we want to make progress on, what we’re going to do first, and how we’re going to hire to do it. We’ve hired two people I’m super excited about to join us part-time, and I created an onboarding process to introduce them to Support Driven and their roles.
Best of all, I’m feeling closer to the community. Leaving my old job was really hard. I still miss hanging out with my teams — the team I led and my team of co-leads. Now, between being at Support Driven for seven months, participating in the book club, and attending Summit without being the primary organizer, I’m starting to get to know people better and make new friends.
Now, at seven months, I’m feeling like, Ok, I can do this.
The photo above is me at SD Leadership Summit, ringing a bell to help gather people at the end of breaks. The bell was super effective — major props to Volunteer Coordinator Yanina Wolfe for suggesting it.
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My Andrea Reads America project is now 5 years old. I started in November 2013, and I am currently reading New York: state number 32 of 50. I’ve got 18 states (54 books) to go.
I’m ready to be finished. Why do I commit myself to stuff like this?
Finding books I like has been pretty hit or miss. I’ve discovered a few books through this project that I would have likely never read without it, like The Book of Unknown Americans set in Deleware, A Thousand Acres set in Iowa, and The Ox-Bow Incident set in Nevada. I’m certain I wouldn’t have taken on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury without this project, and I probably wouldn’t have read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
But because I want to finish, to get out from underneath this dumb promise I made to myself, I often find myself reading books out of obligation rather than pleasure. “I need two more books from New Mexico, but I’m not really in the mood for any of the options I’m finding.”
When I come across a book that sucks me in, I am delighted. The other night, when I held my book in front of my face as I walked around the house, read as I loaded dishes in the dishwasher, and took my book into the closet with me and continued reading as I grabbed a sweater, switching the book from hand to hand so I could keep reading while I put my arms in the sleeves, I knew I’d found a good one.
I’m reading The Godfather, and rather than wishing it were 150 pages so it will be over soon, I’m excited that it’s a long one.
Butterfly Mind 