Sutro Tower and Moon

That’s what I’m doing right now, ensconced in my  window seat in coach on my flight home, playing Aretha Franklin’s “Young, Gifted, and Black” tuned up loud enough to drown out the food-smackers behind me while I tidy up trip reports and budget forecasts and put the buff on a small preservation planning grant.

But it was also what I did at ALA…

… When I picked up my badge and began my peregrinations through meetings and exhibits

… When I met up with old and new colleagues over dinner, coffee, lunch, walks down the street, hugs in the hallways

… When I walked into the Council chambers at ALA Midwinter to hustle up a few signatures for my petition to run as an at-large Council candidate.

I felt it was time to get back into ALA governance. I had been puzzling over whether this was, in fact, the right thing for me to do (in addition to LITA Nominations and GLBTRT External Relations and the occasional panel, such as the “ROI in Academic Libraries” Springer hosted last Friday) until I walked into the Council Chambers.

When I push open our door tonight, I know what to expect: Sandy, our cat Emma, my favorite spot on the green couch, a pile of unopened mail, the Sutro Tower twinkling on the hill. I am not being arch when I say I had a similar (if not quite as numinous) experience in the Council chambers today, when I tweeted that I had a petition and within minutes it was overflowing from signatures from Councilors both fresh and well-aged.

I sat a spell, watching the text transcripts unfold on the wall, watching Councilors debate and stand up and stretch and fill out ballots and knit and scoot onto the Web. (A colleague asked me how anyone could “stand” to be in Council for all those hours, and I replied, “These days, the Internet.” By gum, when I was in my first term we sat there in our analog misery, front and center!)

There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since my third term on Council. Financial downturn for my job (Librarians’ Internet Index). The move to Florida. The Florida Era. The move back to California. I’m still me, six years later, but I have that slightly smudged patina of accumulated experience.

We don’t get an Undo button in life, however useful that would be. We’re blessed and cursed with our history. One truth I have had to learn is that for some of us — many of us? — our sense of place looms large in that history.

For many years I preached — and lived — the mantra of “geographic flexibility.” Education, jobs, other opportunities: first I, then we, could follow the wind. I have repeatedly counseled librarians that they had to have geographic flexibility for their careers. I judged them for not seeking jobs far and wide. I looked to myself as an example–I, who had lived worldwide.

Yet it took the Florida Experience to teach me why some people — and I now realize I am in their numbers — have an allegiance to the place they call home so powerful that it is on the other issues in life that they compromise.It’s not that Florida was insanely horrible; it’s that experiences that were less than stellar (and life always has them) took place in a context of alien other-ness — and it was this alien experience that made them sad, at times overwhelmingly so.

There’s an expression, generally condescending: “She knows her place.” It’s too bad it’s never intended as a compliment. I do indeed know my place. I know where I am not “other.” I know where I belong. Not necessarily on this particular block in the Inner Sunset of San Francisco, but not much farther.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about the events at Harvard last week, where the administration presented tough news about reorganization and downsizing. I can’t speak to what — or who — is right or wrong (if anyone or anything is right or wrong). But I can empathize with the sense that one’s place has become liquid under one’s feet, like one of those rolling earthquakes that feel as if they are never going to stop. Even if you know the Big One is going to hit, that’s an intellectual abstraction until the floor has become molten and undulating and the bookcases are swaying to and fro and it occurs to you that your world as you know it is going to end.

I had a very bad moment about six months into the Florida Experiment where I sobbed, “I want my old life back.” Yes, I did. I forgive myself for that highly emotional moment because I had hit upon a fundamental truth about being and place. There was no magic wand, of course, but I made one change, which led to another, and eventually we got very, very, very lucky.

Naturally, I do not have my old life back. That will never happen. We move forward in time, no lux capacitor to reorder that reality, and only through rigorous memory work — personal reflection, and efforts such as writing, film, music, and dance — can we run our fingers over the fluttering fabric of the past.

But I am no longer a displaced person, living in the backward glance. This may not be forever — it’s not mine to predict cataclysmic change or natural disaster — but it is at least how I plan to spend my days, God willing and the creek don’t rise. And for those who thought the same and have learned otherwise, you have my love and sympathy.

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Torture irons on the ship SUCCESS (LOC)

Last weekend on Twitter I saw a post:  “Tell me your favorite books on failing and failure, especially as it relates to innovation and leadership.”  I responded with this comment: “another blog post I don’t have time 2 write: how failure is overrated, & often confused w iterative design.”

I got up a little earlier than usual this on Monday (thanks to a cat who was licking my face) and decided to see if I could succeed (as in, not fail) at a 20-minute post on this topic. Cindi Trainor does a good job of capturing some of my thoughts, but I wanted to paraphrase/amplify, if only in the spirit of chiming in. I’ll use my writing experience to add crunchy bits of flavor and texture.

I know the conversations about failure are intended to get us comfortable with owning up to the idea that we don’t always succeed, and that if you don’t break a few eggs, you’ll never make an omelette (or something). That’s terrific. But let’s be clear that succeeding is personally and professionally more rewarding than failing. The delta is the difference between how I feel when I get a rejection letter and how I feel when I get that magic email or phone call that an essay has been accepted for publication.

Furthermore, claiming you’re comfortable with failure is dangerous if what you’re really doing is being uncomfortable with iterative design and group input. Don’t give up too early in the design process, and for God’s sake, set your vanity aside and let others help you. A good idea may need tuning; it will nearly always need iteration, particularly after it’s been tested in anything like a functioning environment.  If you love your idea, if you think it’s valid, you owe it more than one try.

(I cannot tell you how many times, late in the survey design process, I have to insist that yes we DO need to test the survey one more time–and I’m talking about surveys I’ve designed, not others. You don’t get a do-over once you launch a survey, just like you get one chance to submit an essay to a literary journal. That last 10% of effort separates good from great.)

Invention usually comes from individuals (a point Roy Tennant has made more than once), but it takes a village to bring ideas to life. One phenom I’ve observed in work organizations here and there is discomfort with feedback, coupled with the mistaken idea that input on a design immediately voids the value of the original creator’s effort. My guess is this stems from how we approach higher education these days, which is to emphasize individual achievement–a very artificial model.

I have heard workers say, “Well, I can’t take credit for this idea, because others helped me.”  I acknowledge all the people who help me with my own writing, but in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s me and my keyboard, revising my essay. It’s still your idea, even if someone told you it would be better off purple, not green.

I’ve also observed workers losing interest in an idea once they received feedback on it. Absolutely we want to acknowledge people who participated in making an idea come to life. But it doesn’t negate the value of the original idea.

My first semester in the MFA program, back in 2004, I observed one very smart, skilled writer dropping out of the program within weeks of starting. My take then (never voiced, just pondered) was that this  person could not cope with the very radical level of feedback provided in the workshop environment. This writer liked the idea of “succeeding,” writer-style — to see a work improved enough to be ultimately published — but was not able to handle what success actually required.

My suspicions were further solidified several years later, when I was running a writers’ workshop in Florida and two new members were introduced who unsettled the group for several months through their discomfort with feedback. Needless to say, neither would-be writer had much success getting anything published. But their unhappiness with anything less than glowing confirmation of their writing skills translated into disruptive behavior that threatened the very core of the group. Fortunately, this kind of person is at heart a quitter, and quit they did, before we had to take the final steps to “evict” them.

Are you declaring failure too early  because you’re pain-averse? Almost never have I observed a writing workshop where feedback was intended to kill a writing idea, but the best feedback is necessarily painful–excruciating, I-hate-myself, I-suck, I-am-not-a-writer, pound-the-steering-wheel-all-the-way-home painful.

A writer submitting a manuscript to her peers believes deep down that this will be the time when the other writers say, “This work is perfect.” A writer needs to think that this response is possible; it’s what forces you to give your all to a manuscript for hundreds or thousands of hours upon end only to share it with other people whose role it is to tell you what works, but also, what doesn’t work. A writer may spend thousands of hours on a manuscript only to be told by trusted peers that it needs overhauling top to bottom, or hundreds of pages need to be tossed, or that second-person-omniscence really isn’t working, or magical realism doesn’t belong in a recipe collection. But a writer who wants to succeed will subject herself to the process willingly, fully aware that pain lies ahead.

By the way, if you think most good ideas, or literary works, are extracted in the space of a long afternoon, think again.  Most writers have to curl their hands and breathe shallowly when people say, “Oh yeah, I keep meaning to take a day and write a short story,” and only fantasies about this person’s comeuppance help us survive these moments. (Anne Lamott said it better in Bird by Bird, which should be required management reading; note that her subtitle is Some Instructions on Writing and Life). A long afternoon is about how much time it takes to produce five paragraphs, four and a half of which will soon end up on the cutting-room floor, with or without your workshop’s help (since the purpose of a workshop is to gradually build the governor in your brain that does their work for you), so that the remainder can be revised ten times over.  The same is true of the execution of nearly any good idea.

Finally, the failure may not be in the idea, but how it is introduced and managed. A good idea needs curation: coordination, timing, communication, care and feeding, iteration. Someone tweeted Lombardi’s truism that winning isn’t everything, it’ s the only thing. I don’t buy that, because I’ve learned a lot from good ideas that I couldn’t bring to life (and also because it’s heartless). But you can’t win/succeed/not-fail if you aren’t willing to accept that the response to your great idea may be that it can’t be executed the very minute you think it up and without any modification or coordination. In an organization with the resources to execute ten good ideas, the eleventh idea either has to bump something else off the table, or it will have to wait.

Patience, grasshopper. “Not now” is not the same as “no.”  Sometimes a great idea needs to wait its turn; sometimes it is simply precocious, and in a year will be timely. Other times, a great idea has lost its prime moment and needs to be left behind on the altar of things that could have happened in an alternate universe. You’re all the better for having had a great idea; there will be many more.

Yes, winning is part of it, but learning how to win is even bigger. I didn’t complete this post on Monday; I had to get to work, and it wasn’t done. It was better to let it marinate a day while I forged on to other things. It’s still not much as far as writing goes–it’s a hasty blog post, not an essay in the New Yorker, and my expectations for it are low.  The essay I worked on for an hour and a half early this morning, on the other hand, will take many more hours to reach its first draft, and I will willingly break my heart ten times over, shredding the essay to pieces, reconstituting it, spending sunny days staring at a screen, to see it succeed.

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So I’ll depart circa 10/17, stop in Des Moines, stop in Truckee to see my baby sister Maia (unless it’s snowing… in which case I’ll do a train trip a little later), then arrive in NorCal in time to get to the DMV and do a smog check before my job starts.  I’ll be in sundry temp housing for the next couple of months, first one place and then another, and Sandy will join me circa early January.

Meanwhile, the Adventures in Packing continue! Here are some highlights:

* Finding $52 Canadian in a shoebox

* Finally getting rid of those size 2 dresses with the huge shoulder pads… 1989 will never be here again (and neither will size 2)

* Discovering a nice dress jacket that looks cute over just about any brown skirt had a missing button… and then finding its spare button (I have long stuffed all my dress buttons in a jar; the only problem is I don’t get rid of them when I get rid of their outfits… but at least I have them!)

* Weeding over 60 books from my collection, and still feeling I have Too Many

* At the nudging from my accountant, shredding tax documents older than three years (ok, I stopped at five years… but I had kept every file back to 1990)

It’s nice to have two weeks dedicated to packing. I’ve done packing-as-a-night-hobby before, and I end up deluding myself about how much work is entailed.  This way I have but one job, and must do it well and on time!

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Ok, to put this news in context…

A few months back Sandy and I had a series of family discussions, and we realized that we were in agreement on a change of strategy to move to a place where Sandy could find employment and to be closer to the large urban areas we’ve always preferred.  Northern California has always been first on that list for me, and Sandy grew to love it too.

Also, I have greatly enjoyed my work  at Equinox, and consider myself a part of the open source community forever, but I really wanted to return to the kind of job that has most suited me — leading a small, nimble library organization into the future. I want to settle in and do amazing things.  Just what remains to be seen (or, more literally, interpreted from needs assessments and strategic planning), but I see this new position as an opportunity to pull  together everything I have ever learned about anything and apply it at one of the most crucial moments in history for libraries.

We then backburnered all these ideas while I plunged into a particularly demanding (and fun) period in my work at Equinox, and it was not until late August that I roused myself enough to begin checking library job postings (though a couple of times people floated opportunities past my radar screen, and I felt like Goldilocks: no, not that chair… no, not THAT chair, either…).

I remember a friend saying that we “couldn’t” leave Tallahassee because we “couldn’t”  sell our house. My thoughts at that moment (not expressed out loud) were that the only things we really had to do in life were pay taxes and (eventually) die.  We have a lovely house in a bucolic park district, and if we can’t sell it, some lucky tenants are going to really enjoy it.

Anyway, a number of things came together very suddenly.  And I deeply appreciate our good fortune in being able to return to California. In fact, I am humbled by it.

These have not been wasted years for us. They’ve been hard years, but those are usually the learning years.  I have acquired skills and experience these past three years that I wouldn’t have learned any other way, and met people I consider friends for life.

I’m going to miss Meyers Park, and the beer tastings at New Leaf Market, and the cardinals at the birdfeeder, and the Shell Oyster Bar, and my dear, dear writing friends; but I will tuck all of this in my shoebox of memories and carry it with me as we head west, retracing our steps back home.

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Maybe it’s all cyclical? I spend some time on Facebook, a little on Twitter, and a lot more offline. I am refocusing on neglected personal-writing tasks that took a back seat to conference and travel activities. I have my taxes (yes, I filed an extension). We have also been organizing things.

Speaking of organizing things, sometimes people ask me how Sandy is doing. She’s doing very well (except for a bad cold) considering that she’s been out of work for a year. The process of finding a new church job is always slow, and even slower in this economy. Profiles get sent out, church committees meet… and meet.

Some of the well-intended approaches people recommend don’t really work. For example, she needs to stay in her denomination, which will mean we move somewhere at some point.  (This is something we hadn’t factored in when we moved here: there are almost no UCC churches in this area, and by that I mean a very broad geographic area.)

Prior to our move here, she had a series of successful jobs, so I am sure she will land another. It may take a more creative approach, and we are being very careful about the “where,” but it will happen.  We do think about issues such as indefinitely living on one income, COBRA running out, etc. — we have to.  Our heads are not in the sand.

I have a telework job; will I be able to stay in this job if we move? It all depends. Teleworking a short hop from Atlanta would certainly work. Teleworking from Juneau might not. (No, there is no chance we are going to Juneau.) Honestly, I don’t worry about those issues. I am too busy!

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I gave the questioner one-third of my full response.

The first slice of that three-piece pie is that I had left the project, so it wasn’t my call what happened to LII. Nobody likes the former boss who lurks around the office, complaining that people are Changing Everything. I had a good talk with Joe Janes about how good it was to know that our projects had new homes (he is the founding father of the Internet Public Library).

LII has been around since the early 1990s. How amazing is it that it even survived? If I wanted to ensure its survival,  then I should have stayed on at the helm, regardless of the personal cost. That’s what it means to be in charge.

The middle slice of the pie (usually the best one, ay?) is that my lesson with LII is about the value of “open” — open source, open data, open leadership. There was a time that I was trying hard to figure out how to take LII into nonprofit status, and my vision was to leverage the openness of its data. But there were countervailing forces pushing against that vision. According to this view, we just needed to figure out how to make the data MORE private and monetize it. My failure of leadership was never coming up with a good-enough argument that would both let the Powers relax their reins while maintaining some semblance of funding during the transition period.

The final slice of the pie is, to me, amusing-but-weird, or weird-but-amusing. One reason for my profound silence on the subject was embarrassment.

Remember when I quit my job in 2007 and was looking for work? I wrote Drexel about the possibility of teaching there as an adjunct… and they turned me down.  Not even with an interview or with further discussion; I sent them an email and they very quickly responded to say,

Thank you very much for your interest in adjunct teaching at Drexel’s College of IST.  The adjunct search committee has received your application and carefully reviewed.  We appreciate your time and effort in sending us these materials.  However, we have determined that your background and experiences do not provide a match for our College’s needs at this time.

Quite honestly, I had never been turned down for adjunct instruction (I’ve taught at two schools), and I’ve been solicited to teach in some nice programs (when life allows, all I’m going to do is teach library science, offer writing workshops, work on literary essays, and take up more amusing hobbies). Not to brag on myself too badly, but I’m a very good teacher who would do it for a living if life had that trajectory (and not to snipe too much at their email, but that second sentence isn’t even grammatical).

Being jobless at the time, and feeling incompetent and lost in middle life, and missing our old golden world in California — which of course was not as golden as it seemed in retrospect — running a grant-funded project is always a bit of a ride, and so forth, but I was full of regret at that time in my life… the email from Drexel proved what I already knew: I was just a stinky ol’ pile of dog poop.

So I did what I knew would make me feel better: I forwarded the rejection email to some friends, and they made me laugh. Within a couple of months, I was working at My Place of Work Minus 1, a very nice group of folks where I got to do some neat stuff and felt valued and useful, and a year after that I was in my current very-kewl job. (Once in a while I even get asked about teaching, though it will be a couple of years at best before I can do that… I’m steeping in ginormous barrels of new knowledge right now.)

So after that conversation at Midwinter, I stopped by the Drexel table in the exhibit hall and said, “Hey, I used to run LII. Thanks for taking it over.” The nice ladies in the booth didn’t really know what I was talking about, or that I sometimes wished I still ran LII, or that I still had a bug in my bonnet about what I couldn’t do with LII back in the day, or that when I was down and out Drexel made me feel even worse, and that sometimes I run across that rejection email and force myself to laugh, because if you can’t laugh then you need to hang it up.

The nice ladies in the Drexel booth just smiled and we had a nice chat, and as I needed to do, I then moved on.

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So the downside of the election is that voters in California, Arizona, and Florida trounced gay-marriage rights. Sandy and I have received very sympathetic mail from friends. I am still turning it over in my head. I gave my first talk yesterday and to my relief it went well (Lizanne was terrific), so my brain is no longer singularly locked onto the idea that I’ll get up in front of people from another country and make a complete fool of myself.

I have an essay, “The Outlaw Bride,” coming out in the next issue of Ninth Letter. This essay is about our experience in 2004 — being able to marry, and then having our marriage invalidated. I just saw the proofs a week or two ago, and they are beautiful — literally beautiful, laid out on what looks like wedding stationery.  I was hoping the essay would be ancient history, but sadly, instead, it is timely response and advocacy.

Meanwhile, in the “where do I begin” category, I received this non sequitur of a comment on an earlier post about the election:

Zeke 72.226.71.192 cpe-72-226-71-192.nycap.res.rr.com

Instead I think you should consider yourself as a chicken with an asterisk concerning the lack of candor (aka lying) on your resume. When will you admit what you were doing at the University of Michigan. Is it really all that embarrassing to flub a PHD? Free range what?

I don’t know Zeke, assuming this person exists, but this puzzles me, as I have been quite direct with anyone who needs or even wants to know that I successfully completed one semester at UM in 1995 and then dropped out.  Who is this person, dragging around all this misplaced righteous indignation? (We could say “apparently a Roadrunner user in New York,” though even that could be misleading.)

Yet “Zeke’s comment,” small and angry though it is, rocketed me back to a tough time that turned out all right in the end — one I am asked about now and then. Since it is part of my pre-blogging history, here goes.

(Needless to say, as with my other blog posts, you’re still only getting part of the story.)

The academics were not the hard part. In fact, this will sound all wrong (all “tall poppy,” to be Australian about it), but the academics weren’t even hard — they felt like just more graduate-level library work. (I’m sure I would have hit a tough class later on. However, I have met enough low-voltage PhD students to think my assessment is largely on target.)

UM was just the wrong place, wrong time, wrong PhD topic, and a few more “wrongs.”  Sandy and I were apart (the plan was she would join me later), my elderly cat was dying, a family member was seriously ill, and I rented a room from a woman who turned out to be a distracting wack jobby whose hooting voice and shrill giggle regularly woke me up in the wee hours.

I was alone and miserable and suddenly realized I had no idea why I wanted a PhD.

I walked away from a fellowship, and later, at SUNY Albany (where I also taught as an adjunct), I took Tom Galvin’s advice and didn’t formally pursue a PhD in that program. Sandy and I weren’t sure how long we would be in Albany, and Tom said I could afford to drop out of a PhD program once — just not twice.

Just Because I Could, I took information technology policy from Tom. Add info policy to the list of classes that should be required for library students. Add taking a class from Tom (RIP) as something not to be missed — he took a potentially deadly topic and made it edge-of-the-seat important and fascinating.

I inevitably provide my UM transcript to my employers even if it’s not required, as my performance speaks for itself.  I’m just another PhD dropout, but I did all right (and ACM published one paper I wrote during the program).

On the fatal topic — freenets and community networks — as soon as I closely examined what then appeared to be a hot topic, I realized freenets would be largely extinct very soon, and that the topic was at best ancillary.

I might have stayed in UM’s program if I had been better-equipped to ask for and make the changes I needed. But then I surely would never have gone back for an MFA in writing, which was the academic experience of my life — scary, boundary-pushing, crazy-making, wonderful.

I’ve off-and-on pondered LIS PhD-ville, but there are faster and less expensive ways to retool, if retooling is in order. For one crazy scheme I have in mind, I’ve pondered a CAS in digital libraries, to better equip myself, but again — I’d want to be sure I was leaping onto the right streetcar (and at the moment, I don’t have the fare).

In a twist tying all of this together, our decision to hit the undo button on Michigan was a defining moment in our life together, one I mention in “The Outlaw Bride” — a moment that says, regardless what the state thinks, Sandy and I are nonetheless married.

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First, I’m going to miss My (Current) Place Of Work. They are great folks and when I said I was leaving they expressed great sorrow and sent some VERY funny pictures.

But I had an offer I couldn’t refuse — well, I could have refused, but then I’d be kicking myself for the rest of my life, and what fun would THAT be? (Like this cupcake I ate in New York City last December. Sure, diets, whatever… but I’m still glad I ate the cupcake.)

As of June 23 (just in time for ALA!), I’m the Community Librarian at Equinox, the support and development company for Evergreen, the premier, industrial-strength open-source integrated library system software.

What, you ask, is a Community Librarian? It’s a chief blogger, presenter, evangelist, community liaison, birds-of-a-feather organizer, strategist, branding specialist, user-experience person, project management advisor, and whatever else happens to need doing. (I wrote the job description, and I think that hits the high notes.)

After sixteen years in LibraryLand (more, if you count college and high-school jobs), I want to be working on the future of libraries. It’s time. For nearly two decades I’ve watched libraries struggle with closed legacy software, and the advantages of open source — particularly in a highly-scalable system — are obvious to me.

Making the advantages of open source obvious to YOU will be part of my job.

Where will I work?

I don’t like to say “from home” — that sounds too parked-in-a-chair — I think a better term is “telework,” because first, our home will probably change sometime in the next year, and second, the point is that I’ll be wherever Evergreen and Equinox need my voice and presence. I will make trips throughout Georgia and to the Norcross offices of Equinox (I’m starting to like Atlanta — it’s an interesting city) and far, far beyond.

I’m sad to leave MPOW… learned a lot, great people; definitely recommend MPOW to anyone interested — but I’m excited about the future. (I hope that was a nice-enough farewell to my buddies at MPOW. I’m hoping they give me a green Prius as a going-away present… though that means I better finish that Shibboleth report Greg is waiting for..!)

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