Blog Archive

A short story whose time to be shared has come. To be part of something, as it were. Maybe. It's called "Misfit Lumber." Sound of sawing. Man’s shoes on floor. Light goes out. Workshop door closes. Pile of lumber comes to life. Odds and ends of boards. Scraps unused. Misfit lumber in the dark. The wood comes to life. What happened to Pat? they ask. What happened to that piece of pine?

Where does good writing come from? I admit, for a long time, I never gave this question much thought. I never needed to be motivated to write or told to strive to do it well, and I never thought about how other people did it. You might as well have asked me how I breathed.

Jasmine Bina, co-founder of a strategy think-tank, Concept Bureau, riffed on LinkedIn the other day about “grieftech.” … She wrote, It would be really great for a brand in this category to lead with a new thesis or belief of what death and grief are *supposed to mean to us today*. That could change everything. We're asking ourselves, but don't have an answer for that yet.

This is an expanded version of a column I wrote for the university newspaper, which gives me 350 words–enough to introduce an idea, not enough to develop it. The headline of the original post was “Vocabulary lesson:

This post expands on a comment that I made on a research culture blog from the University of Glasgow, in a post about the narrative CV. In the post, the author defined the narrative CV as “a CV written in a narrative style.” Overall the discussion was helpful, but it left one question unanswered: what does “narrative style” mean?

Two winters ago, in the embrace of a Covid lockdown, my youngest son and I started making A2-size drawings in which he draws a series of abstract connected shapes in pencil (often "taking a line out for a walk," often something else), I ink the lines, and we color the spaces together with whatever crayons, markers and colored pencils we have on hand.