Endless Knots

She helped

Given our predicament, we've been on the receiving end of a great deal of kindness and generosity over the past four months. At the beginning, the kitchen counters were piled high with brownies and chocolate cakes and pies and shortbread. A favorite couple friend sent one of those elaborate fruit arrangements; another brought baked chicken; another ravioli. There was so much food that we had to buy another refrigerator, which served the dual purpose of allowing us to have enough food to serve all the people dropping by and to put out that which they'd brought.

That time has passed for the moment. As a social worker said near the beginning, a crisis only lasts for so long. "Figure four to six weeks," she predicted, and she was right. You can only tolerate that high-pitch of living for so long and then things have to return to some regularity, albeit one that doesn't feel regular with all the medical appointments, trips to the pharmacy, and suchnot.

But then out of the blue (wonder why that expression isn't "out of the black"), long after the initial crazy period has died down, something else happens.

One morning a package arrived with Amy Reece's return address. "You seem to have a book from Amy," Jeff said, handing it to me. It didn't feel like a book because it was soft (in retrospect, I guess it could have been one of those fabric books for the twins, but that didn't occur to me).

Inside something wrapped in turquoise tissue paper and tied with a lime green ribbon, along with a card in the same colors with a lovely personal note. The gift? A silky soft pale green pashmina. I love pashminas, wear them as often as I can, and, as with all women who have them, wish I had one in every color. I didn't have this color and it goes beautifully with a number of pieces I have.

I don't know how Amy knew how much I love pashminas. We've never discussed them. In fact, we've never even met face-to-face. We worked on a project together for Cisco last year, spoke a few times on the phone, clearly liked each other but I never would have expected her to know what was going on with us -- and certainly never expected a gift like this. Somehow she found out and decided to respond this way.

Here's a bit of the note I wrote Amy later that day. It says everything I'm working up to saying here:

We've received many notes, dear Amy, from people we know well and from those whom we hardly know, many of which end with "please let me know what I can do." The words that always come to mind are "find a cure for pancreatic cancer" or, in my more cynical moments, "You want me to not only deal with this but also figure out how to make you feel better about it???" I'm ashamed of those feelings, of course, but they're really there.

Every now and then - and only from our closest friends - something completely unexpected appears that sands off all that meanness in me, takes away a few moments of the pain, and makes the whole experience not worth it exactly but elevated to a level of connectedness that I've rarely experienced.

Such is your gift of kindness, my dear.

Thank you so very much, Sweet Amy. May I blog about this? I want the whole world to know who you are.

So now I'm blogging about it (she didn't object). Again, here's Amy's site. You now know how kind she is and by clicking you'll see how talented.

 

 

"The conference call"

Thanks to Richard Dale, Dave Grady "from the annual Citizens Bank Employee Talent Show." Have you been on this call?

 

 

TAE Radio: What Are “Virtual Teams” and How Do They Work?

My conversation yesterday on The American Entrepreneur, interviewed by David Iwinsky. We talked a lot about email, communication "lenses," the next generation of leaders, stuff...

Self-canceling policies

Organizations that have public web pages that employees can't access from internal networks.

Last summer I spent a lot of time with a patient in a NYC academic medical center. Guests could log on to the hospital's wi-fi network (shaky but it was there) but could not access the hospital website. Frustrating...as in what hours is the gift shop open?

 

 

Old Friends Farm

Just this.

 

Listen in - The American Entrepreneur, Aug 19 5 PM EDT

I'm a guest on Pittsburgh radio's The American Entrepreneur tomorrow at 5 PM. Listen in! Send questions! Comment!

Local Entrepreneurs Reaching International Soil to Achieve Success

Guests: Ilana Diamond, Jeff Kelly, Jessica Lipnack, Jeffrey Stamps

When is the best time for you to go global with your business?  What are the pitfalls you’ll face along the way?  What do you need to do right now to adapt to international markets?  These questions and more will be tackled by American Entrepreneur Radio guest host David Iwinski, “The International Capitalist”.  Dave will talk with a pair of local entrepreneurs, Ilana Diamond of Sima and Jeff Kelly of Hamill Industries, who have “been there and done that” when it comes to going global with a business.  Plus, Dave talks with Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, co-authors of “Virtual Teams: People Working Across Boundaries with Technology”, about the future of business operation around the world, and the many opportunities this future will provide to entrepreneurs, both large and small.

Simple distinction in virtual teams

In interviewing someone yesterday for an upcoming presentation, he made this good distinction in his workforce: remote workers, who are indeed far away and rarely, if ever, come to the office, and telecommuters, who work from home but come into the office once or twice a week.

Each requires separate engagement strategies with the harder challenge coming with those who are remote. One way this exec addresses it: remote workers lead conference calls. Results in very high participation from those at a distance.

"The world's worst Buddhist" might be the best

Andrea Miller's Shambala Sun interview with Mary Pipher (famous to this mother of girls for her groundbreaking book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls), "Is this the worst Buddhist in the world?," caused me to google a bit, bringing me to Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio interview with her in 2009. The occasion for the interviews: Pipher's new book, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World, where instead of writing insightfully about others, she writes about herself. Haven't read the book but, if you want a self-reflective laugh, i.e. I could identify embarrassingly, go to about minute 6 in the youtube video... and here's an excerpt from the magazine interview that reddens the face as well:

Why do you call yourself “the worst Buddhist in the world?”

 

It came from a remark my husband made to me. One day, after meditating for forty-five minutes, I started listening to NPR. I was also dialing United Airlines to make some changes to an itinerary and stir-frying some onions for a stew and, at the same time, while I was on hold, I asked my husband if he’d done the two or three things I’d asked him to do that day. He was reading the paper, trying to relax, and he said, “You’re the world’s worst Buddhist.”

 

 

Why I didn't (or couldn't) become an academic

Google alert set to "virtual leader" brings us to this abstract:

Without assuming that the interaction diagraph is strongly connected or contains a directed spanning tree, this paper studies the second-order leader-following consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems with general network topologies. Based on graph theory, matrix theory, and LaSalle’s invariance principle, a pinning control algorithm is proposed to achieve leader-following consensus in a network of agents with nonlinear second-order dynamics. Furthermore, a pinning consensus protocol is developed for coupled double-integrators with a constant reference velocity. In particular, this paper addresses what kind of agents and how many agents should be pinned, and establishes some sufficient conditions to guarantee that all agents asymptotically follow the virtual leader. Numerical simulations are given to verify the theoretical analysis.

I think it says that everyone follows the leader, which I believe we learned in first grade. But without the numerical simulations. Here's the citation for what is certainly a brilliant paper (no offense, authors of "Second-order leader-following consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems via pinning control").

Great pictures of Wangchuk Meston on Brandeis site

That's the whole story, really, right there in the title of this post. The article announces the Brandeis (he graduated in 1996) scholarship fund started by Wangchuk's father's relatives.

Please note also the fund started to support Wangchuk's immediate family. Checks should be made out to "Meston Family Memorial Fund" and mailed to Curley Law Firm, 1 Common St, Wakefield, MA 01880. Patrick Curley, a close friend of Wangchuk and Phuni's, led the Buddhist service that took place on July 14 and, with Tenley Palsang, led the memorial service on August 1.

Daja Wangchuk Mizu Meston, 1970-2010

Bryan Marquard's sensitive and insightful obit ("Daja Meston: Buddhist peace hid his inner struggles") in today's Boston Globe for our dear friend, Wangchuk. I've written about him and his wife Phuni a number of times before here, never expecting what has happened. Wangchuk, who struggled with depression, took his own life on July 11.

Phuni, along with their friends Robert Barnett, head of the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University, and Patrick Curley, an attorney here in Boston, speak beautifully about Wangchuk in the obit. Please read it.

Today friends and family will gather for his memorial service at 3 PM at 10 Twin Pond Lane, Lincoln, MA.

We are all so very sad.

 

 

 

 

 

Margaret's memorial service, a bit delayed

How many people show up at a memorial service, say, 160 years after the person's death when it's a Sunday in the middle of July and the temperature is 95? In the case of Margaret Fuller, a chapel-full, as per yesterday at Mount Auburn's Bigelow Chapel, perhaps as many as 75 (sorry, I failed to count).

The Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski led the service, giving the eulogy (please publish it, Rosemarie), which was followed by Jessa Piaia, portraying Margaret and reading a sampling of Margaret's premonitions about her death (there were many; Jessa read from a letter Margaret had written to her mother), and original "rememberances" written by her contemporaries: Emerson (Wendell Refior), Thoreau (Richard Smith), James Freeman Clarke (Rob Velella), Elizabeth Peabody (Dorothy Emerson), and Julia Ward Howe (Deb Goss).

From the chapel, we walked to the Fuller Family Plot at the cemetery, where I made  brief remarks,* read the cenotaph, and encouraged people to step forward, take a snapdragon, bouquets of which my husband, Jeff Stamps, and I had carried from the chapel in baskets, to say a few words about Margaret. Many came forward, including one of Margaret's descendants and her namesake, Margaret Fuller. Rob Velella placed a wreath at the cenotaph that Fuller's family had erected in her memory in 1854.

Jeff and I took two snapdragons and placed them on the marker for Bucky and Anne Fuller's graves, about twenty feet away.

Many snapped pictures during the service and at the plot. Please post them, friends, or send some to me and I'll post them here.

*I can't recall exactly what I said but here's the gist:

Margaret liked to walk and she also liked to push people to their limits so the long walk from the chapel to the plot in the terrible heat was fitting. (I then read the text of the cenotaph--above). After people had placed the flowers, I noted that it's customary among her biographers and admirers to say that Margaret's life was cut too short, that she should have lived longer than to 40. But, perhaps, she had lived just the right number of years because here we were, 200 years after her birth, dozens of us, still celebrating her life and works. And perhaps 200 years from now, when she will be 400, there will be a similar number gathered to honor her remarkable spirit which fills the sky.

Margaret Fuller Memorial Service - Sun, July 18 - 160 years after fact

 
Margaret Fuller, along with her husband and young son, died in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, NY, on July 19, 1850. The Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski, a student of Margaret's life and a member of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial committee, had the brainstorm to conduct a proper memorial service for her at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where her memorial stone stands in the midst of the Fuller family plot. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and barring unforeseen circumstances, which seem to be my lot at the moment, will be part of the group, speaking a few words at the actual plot. Here's the press release.

This Sunday, July 18th, at 12:30 there will be a memorial service in commermoration of the life and legacy of Margaret Fuller Ossoli at Mount Auburn Cemetery, 580 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA.  Actors will appear in costume to pay tribute to this significant woman.  The doors of Mount Auburn’s Bigelow Chapel will open for a reception at 12:30.  Bree Harvey, Director of Education and Visitor Services for the cemetery, will welcome guests promptly at 1:00 P.M.   Rev. Rosemarie Smurzynski will lead the Memorial Service and Eric Huenneke will provide the music.  After the service, participants will walk to the Fuller family lot for a wreath-laying ceremony at 2:00 PM.

The actors participating in the program are as follows: Jessa Piaia as Margaret Fuller, Wendell Refior as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rob Velella as James Freeman Clarke, Dorothy Emerson as Elizabeth Peabody, Richard Smith as Henry David Thoreau, and Deborah Goss as Julia Ward Howe.

This event is part of the Bicentennial’s Conversations Series, supported by a grant from Mass Humanities and modeled after the “Conversations” Margaret Fuller offered for women (and later men) in Boston in the late 1830s and early 1840s.  It is co-sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee and the Friends of Mount Auburn and is part of a year-long series of events celebrating Margaret Fuller’s life and work.  This event is FREE and open to the public.

Endless Knots dove-style

Cool little tag cloud maker (Tagxedo) that allows you to choose the shape in which your tags appear. With thanks to Daughter #1 who found it, made mine, and sent me the link.

The problem with moving too quickly - Engage with Grace 2

Bloggers will understand. In my haste to throw up the previous post before doing something else that was no doubt vitally important, I failed to look at the slide I included, which was for fun during last year's Engage with Grace campaign. The real slide, with the right questions for your family to discuss relative to end-of-life issues is this one. Sorry (and I'm slowing down, she says, while typing like a maniac).

Remember Engage with Grace?

Very important story on end-of-life decisions or, more importantly, discussions that we all need to have. Piece on NPR site and authored by "AP" (whoever wrote it deserves a decent byline), "Americans are treated, and overtreated to death," features the story of Rosaria Vandenberg, who died from a brain tumor in 2004, with very little time at home and, in retrospect, her family thinks, too much intervention.

The result: her sister-in-law Alexandra Drane started Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project, which I've participated in on Thanksgiving for the past few years during its annual blog rally. Will be even more poignant for us this year.

Here are the five questions for your family to talk about:

 

Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf

Harvard Business Review Blogs carries our post today on the role BP's organizational structure may have played in causing the horror show in the gulf. See "Why BP Crashed and Killed the Gulf." I wrote about this briefly here shortly after the explosion on April 20.

The language of leaving: Passages in Caregiving

A few days after posting about our current predicament, my friend Emily called with urgent news: she'd just heard Gail Sheehy on NPR and I had to read her new book. I picked up Passages in Caregiving a few weeks later. In it, Sheehy, author of the spectacularly successful Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life and many other books, speaks of "eight turnings" in caregiving. That post of mine, titled "A turning for J&J," was written in what Sheehy identifies as the first, Shock and Mobilization. (We're now in The New Normal, according to Sheehy, a fair description of how it feels, a phrase that our friend Carole used after the initial crisis period ended.) I'd used the phrase without benefit of having read her book.

I'm struck with many of the words Sheehy's uses, which so perfectly capture this strange land: shock and mobilization, the new normal, the in-between stage, the long goodbye. We've used them all, others have used those same terms with us, all seemingly spontaneously.

There is no lingua franca for this kind of experience. As our friend Tom (Emily's hubby) said, "We don't know how to do this. We're not trained." Yet when you're in it, the descriptive terms fall out of our mouths without our having googled "terms for stages of terminal illness." Yes, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified five stages of grief, which are both similar and different. Much as I respect her work and have found it useful, those stages don't really apply to where we are with this.

Sheehy's book is filled with stories, including her own, the 17-year saga of her husband, Clay Felker's, cancer. She was the caregiver; they suffered mightily, including financially to support him; and she's drawn brilliant conclusions, including the one that stands out for me: establish your network and you'll be OK. In our experience, our "friendhood" has meant everything to us.

Buy multiple copies of her book and give them to everyone who's going through what Jeff and I are.

Solstice Summer Reading Program

Posting the latest from Solstice, a great line-up of writer/readers, as always:

(Chestnut Hill, MA, June 2010):  The Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College announces its July Reading Series. All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are held in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale after all readings, and there is plenty of free parking!

Friday, July 9 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet and creative nonfiction writer Anne-Marie Oomen (An American Map: Essays and Un-coded Woman), & multi-genre writer Jaime Manrique (Our Lives Are the Rivers and Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, & Me)

Saturday, July 10 at 7:30 p.m.: Poet Kathleen Aguero (Investigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth and Daughter Of); author and illustrator Grace Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and The Year of the Rat); & fiction and nonfiction writer Randall Kenan (Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Century and Let the Dead Bury Their Dead).

Sunday, July 11 at 7:30 p.m.: YA novelist Laura Williams McCaffrey (Alia Waking and the forthcoming Lyla’s Flight); Special guest Patrick Donnelly (The Charge and the forthcoming Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin); & fiction and nonfiction writer M. Evelina Galang (Her Wild American Self and One Tribe).

Tuesday, July 13 at 7:30 p.m.: Solstice Assistant Director and fiction writer Tanya Whiton (published in Crazyhorse and Northwest Review); multi-genre writer Laban Carrick Hill (America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the 60s and Casa Azul); & poet and fiction writer Steven Huff (A Pig In Paris and The Water We Came From).

Wednesday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m.: creative nonfiction writer Michael Steinberg (editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of Still Pitching); Special guest Lesléa Newman (Nobody’s Mother and The Reluctant Daughter); and poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar (A New Hunger and The Hour Between Dog & Wolf).

Thursday, July 15 at 7:30 p.m.: Special guest Kevin McLellan (Round Trip); YA writer David Yoo (Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One Before and the forthcoming The Choke Artist); & Program Director Meg Kearney (Home By Now and the forthcoming Trouper the Three-Legged Dog).

Friday, July 16 at 7:30 p.m.: Novelist Sterling Watson (The Calling and Sweet Dream Baby); fiction writer Helen Elaine Lee (Water Marked and The Serpent’s Gift); & Dennis Lehane (The Given Day, Mystic River, and Shutter Island).

Directions to Pine Manor College, complete bios of our authors, and more information about the Solstice MFA Program can be found at www.pmc.edu/mfa.

Wiley: books, royalties, dust-ups, etc...from a Wiley author

There's a bit of a row going on at the moment of the arcane variety that only authors (and their publishers) can truly appreciate. Not necessarily understand - that might take some accountants, but it's the kind of thing that happens/is happening in publishing that drives everyone involved a bit mad.

Facts: In March, 2010, Wiley and Bloomberg announced a new line, "Bloomberg Press, a Wiley imprint," naming Wiley as the new global publisher and distributor of Bloomberg's books.

We've been Wiley authors for 15 years so have some appreciation for the power of the brand (disclosure: we know and respect a lot of people at Wiley, some of whom are very old friends). Of course, like all authors, we've had our share of complaints but what author can really gripe about receiving regular royalties on a book with multiple translations that came out ten years ago (Virtual Teams)?  Wiley is a very reputable house that's managed to weather the downturn in publishing better than most if not all. Search the stock price and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Now for the dust-up. Some weeks ago Wiley sent a letter to Bloomberg authors explaining the way in which royalty calculations would be done going forward, a change for about 20% of the authors, according to Wiley's press release issued after The Authors Guild took issue with the new arrangement.

To excavate the depth of the disagreement, please read the material from both sides. In brief, there are two principal ways in which royalties, the money paid out to authors, are calculated: 1. on the basis of list price (the price that you see discounted at say, Amazon - here's ours for Virtual Teams (a 35% discount off list); and 2. on the basis of "net proceeds," meaning whatever the publisher receives after everyone in the supply chain takes their cuts. Royalty percentages vary depending on which method is used to calculate royalties -- lower for list (because it's a larger amount); higher for net proceeds (because it's smaller). We have a net proceeds agreement for Virtual Teams and a list price agreement for The TeamNet Factor. Apparently, all Bloomberg authors are being shifted to the net proceeds agreement.

Or, I should say, we would have that agreement if our books were still in regular distribution, which brings us to the next thing that The Authors Guild has pointed out. Like so many other authors whose books still sell in sufficient quantities for publishers to want to keep them on their lists, both of these books of ours are only available now as print-on-demand, POD in the lingo, meaning the publisher doesn't maintain inventory but prints individual copies as they're ordered, likely a somewhat expensive process for the publisher (I don't know the figures at all), which drives the price up (Virtual Teams listed at $29.95 when it first came out in regular distribution; POD lists for $52.50).

Royalty agreements for POD are quite low, which means although the list price is much higher, the percentage for each book sold is low. For the author, this means that fewer books are sold (because market resistance is greater at higher prices) and those that are sold generate a smaller payout. In our case, we're just lucky that Virtual Teams is still in demand. Not true for most authors.

In the case of the Bloomberg authors that The Authors Guild is concerned about, a number (I don't have a precise figure but maybe Authors Guild does and certainly Wiley knows) DID NOT HAVE POD AGREEMENTS in their original contracts. Thus, ex post facto, Wiley is adding contract terms without negotiation. While Wiley may be absolutely right that this will in most cases generate better payouts to authors, the process seems less than ideal.

Blockbuster author Scott Turow is concerned enough that he issued a very quotable statement ("Wiley should knock it off and do the right thing") and I've received a number of emails about this from author organizations that I belong to and from other friends.

I encourage my friends at Wiley to work this through as quickly as possible, sitting down (virtually of course) with each of the affected authors, then making as transparent a statement as possible to the public. The number of authors impacted is very small but the effect on Wiley's reputation could be outsized in proportion.