Welcome to October’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Webzine! Thank you so much to everyone who has stayed with this project since our first early clumsy posts in August, and to the new readers discovering our group venture.
October saw fewer submissions, and we put in the time to communicate and connect and conduct interviews with many of our contributors about their unique projects.
For example, Melissa Peabody creates artistic nature documentaries meant to inspire as well as educate people about the impact of returning large wildlife species on our urban ecological landscape. Telling the story of the coyote began for her when she and her family suddenly spotted one in an unlikely place, atop a hill near her home. She then turned that experience into an opportunity to convey the majesty of nature and ways humans can live peacefully amidst other creatures. Paul Gamble’s paintings stem from his fascination with the egg…the biological fact and artistic symbol of huge, complex creatures emerging from much smaller beginnings, only to produce eggs/beginnings of their own. The biological surprise which hatches from an egg, and the transformative experience of growth, fuel his fanciful, surreal paintings. Caryn West describes an artistic transformation of her own as she found herself unexpectedly painting a whole series of children’s portraits, and how a simple project for her son’s room kicked off an entire coffee table book centered on international humanitarian issues affecting children. Faracy Grouse’s free verse poetry reflects both the anguish and uncertainty of lost love, and the hope and determination to heal sparked by something as simple as the rain stopping for a moment, or blinking and looking at the city one more time. Seemingly ordinary surprises become extraordinary when her speaker notices them, and takes the opportunity to decide to move forward and love herself again.
I do believe that sudden surprises, small or large, can spark inner transformation. However, as these contributors show and suggest, there is also the component of preparing and positioning oneself to be receptive to and appreciative of the world’s surprises. Isaac Newton may have thought of gravity after an apple hit his head…but his careful thought and years of attentiveness to the world around him prepared him for that insight. So I would encourage us all to see moments of beauty in the everyday, to read and think and learn as much as we can, to hold out an open mind receptive to the possibilities of wherever life has us at the moment.
Years ago I attended a traditional Celtic Samhain/All Hallows’ Eve celebration, and the ceremony leader described fall as a time of increasing darkness – but also a time when seeds fall from plants and lie buried under ground resting and preparing themselves for a new beginning. He explained that many beginnings can seem dark and uncertain – as can many great, necessary transformative stages in our lives. But that if we could trust in our hopes and dreams through the lengthening nights and cooling weather of fall and winter, and take the rest and reflection we need, then there could be hope in the next season of growth.
In keeping with the theme I selected a few of my own pieces which I felt reflected surprise and/or transformation in some way: a nonfiction research article on people’s experiences with new telecommuting technology, and a short fiction piece on a supposed car accident and a woman’s grieving process.
I would like to encourage dialogue, feedback, and networking through Synchronized Chaos – please take the opportunity to comment on other artists’ work, offer to pass on the word about their projects, ask questions, suggest ideas to them.
Happy Rosh Hashanah to my Jewish readers, happy early Halloween/Samhain to those who celebrate. Please enjoy the luscious harvest feast that is October’s Synchronized Chaos!
We had a little more space than expected this month, which is wonderful in some ways as we conducted in-depth interviews with some contributors I found especially amazing, resourceful, and creative. However, we’d have loved to hear from more people, so please don’t be shy about submitting 🙂 All are welcome.
Here is another short story of mine, I wrote this piece a few years back after looking through an old college photo album. And I won’t give you a whole long intro to my own piece – so it’s just posted below.
Frozen in Time
Imagine a series of snapshots frozen in time, each representative of one singular moment, one instance, leaving the viewer to make the connections needed to tell the story.
This was the state of Sarah’s mind while she stared at the three-car pileup by the side of the interstate. At the blue sports car and the grayish sedan that had collided with her husband’s aging Honda in the fog, at the crumpled center divider separating the two halves of the road’s curve.
The rescue vehicles had already arrived, their workers hauling two disheveled men out on stretchers and checking vital signs before loading them into the backs of two ambulances. Their walkie talkies buzzed as they relayed messages back and forth, asking questions and giving instructions for a series of daily tasks that they knew would never become completely routine.
All Sarah could do, as she looked out from her position amidst the moist iceplants by the side of the road, was to watch the scene, without emotion, as if she were viewing a movie. Only time would tell if the paramedics and Highway Patrol officers would be able to save the lives of her husband Jose and their young daughter Sharon.
Here is an article evaluating the feasibility of telecommuting as a method of improving ecology and worker morale, summarizing research and interviews I conducted during an informal public online survey. I explore reasons cited by respondents as to why telecommuting has taken off more slowly than expected and look into potential ways to lessen the effect of these negative factors.
Previously published this spring in Global Affairs’ free academic international relations webzine, and reprints are okay. Link to Global Affairs: http://www.globalaffairs.es/
In a Gallup poll conducted near the end of April 2008, United States residents expressed that rising gas prices were one of their main concerns during the current Western economic slowdown. Pollsters asked respondents to categorize issues as ‘crises’ or ‘major problems’ (or minor problems, or not problems at all.) Over forty percent of those polled considered gas prices a crisis, and over half considered them a ‘major problem.’ Gas pricing was more often described as a crisis than mortgage foreclosures, healthcare costs, or job losses.
With these consumer concerns, some employees and employers have looked into telecommuting as a potential method for saving money while also reducing pollution created by daily driving. Telecommuting involves working somewhere other than one’s company office – one’s home, a local coffeeshop, a park – and then communicating online with managers and coworkers.
At first glance telecommuting seems a workable business model: technically possible, offering many benefits to employees and lessening the need for driving. However, United States companies seem slow to adopt the idea of working in a remote capacity, and most employees still commute every day to a physical location.
To explore the feasibility of telecommuting, I posted informal requests on Craigslist throughout April for people to share positive and negative experiences with the business model. I received a good number of positive responses, but other comments suggested more work will be required to overcome technical, social, and cultural challenges if telecommuting is to become practical.
While stenciling a calligraphic alphabet design on the walls of her son’s bedroom, painter and artist Caryn West developed the concept for her new coffee table book project and human rights campaign.
The book, The Trouble with the Alphabet, features countries whose names begin with each letter of the alphabet and where children live in severe poverty or face danger or other human rights violations. Each section depicts a child’s face, taken from a real photo of someone in that nation, superimposed onto a calligraphic English letter, along with a short poem in the simple, powerful words a child of that land might use. A nonprofit, nongovernmental, nonsectarian organization assisting the children in that area follows, with a description of its purpose and work and with contact information for interested readers who may wish to donate or volunteer.
Although The Trouble is not a traditional children’s book and not specifically targeted to children, West and her family encourage parents to discuss the themes the project raises at home.
…Some people think these issues are too heavy for children, too scary. But I believe we need to start introducing them to the realities of the world at younger ages, to encourage compassion in them.
— Caryn West, paraphrased.
Caryn and her husband Brock explain that this book, along with its associated merchandising and media campaign, attempts to reach people who may want to help out somewhere in the world, but don’t have information on what is going on in different places.
When I chatted with Caryn last week, she pointed out how Mohamed Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Grameen Bank, which provides small business loans to individuals and families in developing countries, gave more publicity to international grassroots humanitarian efforts. She hopes to continue this trend of international awareness of human suffering and ways to prevent or ease it – maybe even inspire the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders and ‘cultural creatives’ along a humanitarian path.
Everyone has a gift, she explains. Hers is writing, while others may have great organizational ability and come up with and carry out solutions to world issues. “I would love to be able to reach someone with a gift [in another area], inspire someone who has a solution.”
Her own 18-year old son wants to become a social entrepreneur, founding an organization or business which assists the less fortunate internationally.
I’ll share a few highlights of my conversation with Caryn West:
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Caryn has always been curious about other people and ways of life. Beginning as early as age three, when she accompanied her sisters on a plane flight and approached a gentleman a few seats away. At her invitation the two colored a Mr. Magoo book together, and he turned out to be a major league baseball player who then met her family and became her godfather.
She drew her first portrait at age nine, a crayon rendering of Sammy Davis Jr. for a school report. Although she never planned to continue drawing people and personally enjoys the work of the Impressionists such as Monet more so than that of portrait artists, she relies on the portrait theme to make The Trouble with the Alphabet cohesive. That all began with the idea of looking into the eyes of children – which readers do beginning with the book’s cover. “I start with the eyes, then the face grows out of that.”
She chose to focus on children because they are universal in a way. We all were children once, and most people have a soft spot in their hearts for the very young.
Also, presenting a global situation as it might be depicted by children allows Caryn to provide a short, concise summary and avoid overwhelming her readers with information.
Born with a very empathetic personality, Caryn had to stop work at times when she felt overwhelmed by children’s suffering. Her empathy made her life more painful at times, but also inspired her to put so much time and energy into projects such as these.
The project’s artwork stems from photographs of real children in each of the featured countries (although not every photograph she found online represents someone who grew up in the specific country, each pictured child did live there for a time and suffered due to the nation’s situation.) Caryn located most of her photographs through Flickr, and searched more widely known and smaller websites until she found an image that caught her attention.
Caryn intentionally avoided depicting sick or otherwise injured children as that might be too depressing for readers. Fearing simple expressions of pain and suffering would cause people to look away, she aimed to implicitly convey hope through drawing mostly healthy children with complex, individual facial expressions. Fear, uncertainty, or hope in the kids’ eyes would perhaps draw more readers in to the book than simple pain and hopelessness.
She describes herself as a self-taught artist who cannot avoid painting in her own distinctive style. “I’ve tried to emulate other artists, but my work always turns out the same.” Portraits, to her, represent a huge responsibility – conveying the whole likeness and character of a person.
“I’m not the kind of person who smokes cigars in a coffeeshop,” described Caryn. “I never wanted to be an artist [in itself] …all my work comes out of personal conviction.”
Caryn researched the book using a wide variety of sources, everything from scholarly dissertations to prominent magazine articles to NGO sites to local blogs and personal websites. “I aimed to be well-rounded, read up on as much as I could find.” Oman proved the hardest to research, due to the strict control the Omani government exercises over information leaving the country. However, she was aware of their few laws protecting children from child labor, and featured this as a potential problem facing children.
Caryn was extremely cautious regarding accuracy throughout the project, allowing NGO’s to proofread her profiles of their work and refusing to publish anything until she was sure it was correct.
Some people might ask why Americans should give so much attention to world problems when we have impoverished children within our own borders. To this, Caryn replies that while she sympathizes with struggling Americans, this particular book was intended to have an international focus. Also the numbers of affected people and the scale of the issues depicted in the Trouble with the Alphabet cannot compare to the internal issues within the United States.
Caryn views herself as a kind of world citizen, with a sense of love, responsibility, and loyalty beyond her own nation’s borders. And she “goes around wiping away excuses” for people not to try to improve their world. “Look, the bank foreclosed on my home. But I chose to still write this book. Everyone can do something. Even a homeless person can pick up litter around them, or just decide to be kind to people.”
She cites the example of Eric Reeves, a high school English teacher who raised international awareness of the Darfur crisis simply by crunching numbers at home of people dying in the conflict.
Caryn published The Trouble with the Alphabet herself, through an independent American publisher who could carry out the unique six-color hexachrome process involved in rendering the illustrations. She wanted the promptness, full editorial control, high quality, and environmentally sensitive methods (the book is printed on recycled paper) she could find and select on her own. Although her decision was more expensive in some ways, Caryn stands by her choice to self-publish. “We’ve got to first do the right thing, and then see what happens.”
Synchronized Chaos Editor’s Note: A paperback version of the book is coming out for $24.95 in order to reach more people. Caryn would love to reach out to schools and the education sector.
An angel investor helped fund the project, which came as a true blessing as Caryn and her family lost their home in the slowing economy. The book met with initial success, as people tended to buy more than one copy and well-known NGO’s such as the US Campaign for Burma and the Save Darfur campaign chose to be featured. A NGO is now featured for every country in the book except for Zimbabwe, where Caryn’s criticism of President Mugabe would put the aid workers in danger if they were to stand by the statement. However, she still lists ways to get involved with the people of the country.
The Trouble with the Alphabet has begun to receive international reviews, which so far have been very positive. Caryn very much hoped for a positive response from those around the world, as she learned about the situations she describes through extensive research, but it has not yet been possible for her to travel to many of the featured countries. When asked what she might say in response to someone who asks how she can comment on a nation without having been there, she replied that especially now in the Internet/Information Age, anyone can care about those abroad, even those who can’t afford to travel. Some situations (such as forced child prostitution, violence against children, etc) are simply wrong and hurtful to people, regardless of any situation on the ground. And she aims to leave people with a step towards a solution…reaching out to assist a local indigenous (where possible) nonprofit group in the area who knows the situation well and can help improve conditions.
Caryn has kept her humility throughout the project…she feels as if she’s not necessarily an amazing person, but simply used for this endeavor. And she relies mostly on gut instinct, creativity, heart, and networking (online and person-to-person) to promote the book and merchandise.
“I’ve learned never to dismiss any person as irrelevant [to The Trouble with the Alphabet,]” Caryn explained. Creative networking has become a crucial part in her grassroots/inexpensive marketing strategy. And she alluded to many unique stories of people whom she and her husband met through the publicity process, and to people who are already inspired by her writing.
Editor’s Note: I found the book myself through viral marketing, when Caryn’s husband Brock friended me on Facebook and sent me the link.
The Trouble with the Alphabet is available for viewing and/or purchase at http://www.thetroublewiththealphabet.com/home-page/
