I recently heard a fantastic interview with the author Adam Hochschild on Fresh Air.  He talked about his most recent book, To End All Wars, about WWI.  I always find him to be thoughtful and interesting, but most fascinating in this interview was a short section near the end where he talked about his research for the book.  Not only did he comb through archival material but he also went to the location of the Battle of the Somme and scoured the landscape.  There were no artifacts, of course, but he found something very interesting and something that helped him to set the scene his his book.  In many of the accounts, soldiers had written about looking or charging up a hill.  When he got to the battlefield, Hochschild found no hills.  He was stumped by this until he remembered that most of WWI was fought from dug trenches.  It wasn’t that the countryside was hilly, it was that soldiers had to charge up and out of trenches.  Fascinating.  Listen to the interview.

I attended a great panel at the NarrativeArc conference at Boston University over the weekend.  My favorite moments were listening to Adam Hochschild, Douglas Starr and Mitchell Zuckoff on Friday afternoon.  How to Know What You’ll Never See: The Ethics and Craft of Reconstructing Scenes offered great insight into how skilled researchers find and organize their material.  They all use a mix of archival research and what might be described as “experiential archaeology.”  Yes, they rely on letters, newspapers, public records, medical records, interviews, prior research and they also used local lore, artifacts, images and finally visited the locations featured in their research so they could see what the people featured in their works had seen.

I had read Adam Hochschild’s  King Leopold’s Ghost.  It was one of those arresting reads that takes forever because you’re constantly turning to the endnotes to see where the author got his information.  Aren’t those the most satisfying books?  I was thrilled to hear Hochschild talk about his work but also came away dying to read Starr’s the Killer of Little Shepherds and Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La.  The way they talked about research — the clear passion for finding facts and crafting them into an engaging narrative — was better than any book review I could have read.  Starr and Zuckoff both talked about creating chronologies during their research so that they could look to it as they create the narrative. I would love to see those chronologies.  I am a geek, I know.  I guess it’s my version of wanting to know how things work: how did their minds work while writing…

The conference wasn’t about research.  It was about good storytelling of true things.  All the speakers talked about the importance of good narrative and good writing.  But before you can get to writing you’ve got to have information — and that comes from research.  This panel of speakers sparked all kinds of thoughts for me but it really made me think of some of the research I really admire.  I’m sure I’ll remember more after I’ve written this but here’s a quick list off the top of my head.  What are your favorite pieces of research?

1.  King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild

2. The Murder of Mary Bean by Elizabeth DeWolfe

3. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

4.  Cigar Stories, Lost & Found Sound by Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva

5. The Murder of Helen Jewett by Particia Klein Cohen

6. Rum, Riot and Reform, Exhibition by William David Barry at Maine Historical Society

7. The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester

I love this post from Lisa Petrilli, An Introvert’s Guide to Networking.  Networking is the hardest thing for me.  Meetings are fine.  Working in group is fine.  I’m fine with anything structured around work or with a goal in mind.  But networking, business socials or meet-ups are tough for me.  I can make small talk and I’m certainly not intimidating.  It’s not shyness — and that’s a common misconception.  I’m an introvert.

Blogs and social media are great for introverts.  You can interact without foisting yourself on someone. It’s usually topic-specific and it’s usually short.  Petrilli points out that introverts need to recharge after social situations.  I envy those extroverts who are energized after socials.  They tax me — in the very primal fight or flight sense.

Do you have a hard time explaining what you do?  Or, what your work is?  I’ve long had this problem and am trying to figure out if it’s a blessing or curse.

What do I do?  I work for a writer and shareholder activist.  So what do I do for him?  I write and research, I manage his website, blog and social media.  I coordinate his media contacts and newsletter.  I edit his speeches and articles.  I manage all publication of his work.  I regularly record interviews with him and edit the video for his blog.  I archive research material and his works.  I collect digital and physical copies of his work — like a clippings service.  I track news topics of interest for him to comment or write about, and I identify resources and partners that may be useful to him.

So, what do I do?  You tell me — I don’t really know what to call this. I usually say I do communications or call myself communications manager.  He generously gave me a grander (if more convoluted) title but communications manager seems to better encompass what I do and provide a clearer idea of how I can be useful to anyone contacting us

When freelancing I sometimes write, sometimes I produce and sometimes I research.  I done some archiving and content development.  Does this make me an archivist or writer or producer or researcher?  Oy.  That would make for one messy business card.

What do you do?  What do you call yourself or your job?

I never think much about teaching.  Ok, maybe when I’ve given an oral history workshop or introduced people to research at the MHS Library when I worked there… yes, then I’ve thought about it and planned a presentation.  But, in general, I don’t think much about teaching.  This weekend I taught my nine-year old niece to knit.  And, I was nervous!  Not about whether or not I knew my stuff but because I didn’t want to overwhelm, confuse or turn her off from knitting.  I wanted her to have a good experience and it was on me to make sure it went well.

My niece, A, is nine and has always had an interest in crafts.  She’s not very talkative so I’m not sure how I knew that but I did.  This past Christmas, I managed to knit gifts for just about everyone — the result of some sort of fall insanity.  Without saying so, A seemed to like the hat I gave her and I asked her if she wanted to learn to knit.  We agreed to meet after the holidays and I began to think about the best way to teach knitting.

My only other knitting-related teaching was trying to teach my 70+ year old neighbor an alternative cast-on method.  It wasn’t a failure because she did pick it up but it was a struggle for both of us.  She’s a leftie who knits rightie — there seemed to be some spacial relations – coordination – body memory issues plaguing us.  Whatever it was that made it difficult I wanted to avoid that with A.

I posted questions about teaching kids to knit on a couple of Ravelry groups.  I got some really nice replies but the best was the suggestion to start with something small – like a bracelet.  This appealed to me — a simple project that was likely to offer a completed, successful project in a short time.

I whipped one up so that A could see what she’d be making and then we sat down to do one together.  I cast on, did a couple of demo rows, did a row of hand-over-hand and then she was off!  Seriously, after that she was pretty much on her own with only some verbal cues and a couple of breaks for me to fix a mistake or two.  She could even have a conversation once she got going.

Do all kids do this?  Pick up new skills so easily?  Maybe but I think part of what I was witnessing was someone with innate abilities learn something that they have an aptitude for.  Sure, she was awkward — and I let her figure out her own way to hold the needles and concentrated solely on making the stitches correctly.  She’ll improve grace and technique with practice.  But, for some reason, she could understand the directions and had a natural way of manipulating the yarn. It was interesting to watch and parents (and teaches?) are probably used to this.  To me it was a revelation.

I’m happy to say that our knitting date was a success.  A finished a bracelet and sewed a button on at the end (also a new skill).  I cast on two more for her to take home for practice.  I’m proud of her — and myself.  Sharing something that I love, something that I learned as a kid was gratifying.  It felt generational, a continuation of a long-line of learning shared among women.  A right of passage.

I can’t wait for the next step.

And the interviews are…

I’m very excited to announce the two interviews I’m planning.  Both people are 2012 recipients of the Portland ESL Scholarship Fund and relatively new citizens of Maine.  One is a young Eritrean woman who hopes to improve her language skills and go to college.  The other is a mother and grandmother from Bashkortostan near the Ural mountains in central Russia.  Their application essays were so engaging, so full of life and hope that I found them irresistible.  And these women wrote them in a language they barely know.  Still, they wrote so truthfully, so wonderfully that I could almost picture them in my mind.  Perhaps writing without artifice is truer to who we actually are?

All of the six PESLSF applicants were appealing and I had to work to keep myself to two because I don’t want to over commit and jeopardize the project.  Do you do that?  Jump into a new project with both feet only to find that you can’t manage it all?  I’m trying a more measured approach so that I can produce something that honors these two women and gives listeners a real sense of who they are and the value they bring to our community.

What is the story…

I still don’t know what the story will be for this project.  Or, if it’ll be more than one story.  Interviewing two very different women could lead to — who knows what it could lead to.  I’m trying to go into this interview openly and see where it leads.  In the past, I’ve planned the project and found the interviews that I needed to tell the story. Well, mostly.  I guess when we did the Aucocisco Radio project we let the interviews – at least partially — determine the stories.  Still, this feels like an adventure and I can’t wait to see how it all works out.

Likely, we’ll do the interviews in the next month or two.  I think I could probably overwhelm these women with hours and hours of questions but I’m planning just an hour for each interview.  Better to plan for a brief time and be rewarded with additional time.

More soon…

I just agreed to a volunteer interview project for the Portland English as a Second Language Scholarship Fund (PESLSF).  I’ve been looking for a project — something outside of work that would connect me with community.  Working at home alone is great and I love it, but it doesn’t come with many opportunities to engage.  Largely I sit at home and write for people I’ll never meet in person and rarely correspond with outside of email or web comments.  Not a lot of personal connection…

PESLSF seems like a great organization, helping immigrants to further their education by providing grants for English language instruction.  While they can get financial aid for college classes, it doesn’t cover ESL and that prevents many from going to school.  A number of these people were professionals in their previous lives but lack the language skills to continue their work here.  Programs like this help immigrants become integrated, productive members of our community.

This new project is a unique opportunity to talk with an immigrant while their experiences in the US are still new — to record what it’s like to move across the world to a new country, new culture and new life.  After years of doing historical research, I can tell you that having this sort of first-hand information will be a boon for a writer or historian some day.  For teachers, too.  And, I’m eager to talk to these people — to know these newest Mainers and hear their stories.  Moving across the world must be hard and we’ve seen that adjusting to new populations coming into our state can be hard, too.  I think, though, that hearing people’s personal stories or knowing that people want to hear your story can soften that transition.  I hope so.

This will be a new challenge for me because while I’ve done scores of interviews, they’ve been with a pretty homogenous group of people.  I’m interested to see if the same body language and social cues work — and interviewing relies heavily on these things, I think.  And so much of my interviewing has been with older people on historical topics so I’m looking forward to this opportunity to build new skills, hear new stories and to think about storytelling in a different way.