To Alan Murray. We Hardly Knew Ye.

Good luck old chum. Good health. Good bye . . .

Dancing about Architecture

Remember this, according to Ray Rhamey, blogger and author of books like “We the Enemy” and “The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles” when it comes to showing, not telling:

• Telling is dispensing information
• Showing is evoking experience

But let me show you. First, here’s Andy Williams singing “Try to Remember,” from “The Fantastiks.”

Now here’s me, trying to evoke an experience:

In silhouette he walks toward us, gently walking as if he doesn’t want to leave footprints. The guitar, the horn, the invisible singers in the background; their sounds ripple the air like wind on grain, on the farm we see behind him.

He emerges from shadow. He’s wearing a suit.

Maybe he’s a visitor at the farm, contemplating buying it. Or maybe he’s the farm’s long-lost son, returned from the city, wandering the fields he knew as a child, trying to find those places that captivate his memory: the silo where he played in the shadows, the ditch where he swam, the fallow field where the wild strawberries grew amid the cowpats.

Try to remember the kind of September,
When life was slow and oh so mellow . . .

He doesn’t look at us through the camera. He’s not singing to us. He’s singing to himself, trying to remember as he urges us to remember in song.

Melancholy. He is the boy searching for the magical spots of youth. Though crisply dressed in his blue suit, he has wandered the farm for hours, searching, and finding nothing but the grain that ripples under the wind of the fingers on the guitar, the wind of the lungs blowing into the horn.

But not so melancholy. As he stands, looking over the fields that were once a fairy world, he remembers. He remembers the green grass, the flowing yellow grain. But the memories are faint. He looks up as he remembers, then casts his eyes to the banks of earth at his feet as the memories fade.

He has returned, but he cannot go back to the days when he was a tender and callow fellow, playing in the fields, living in a world where the sky was small because the fields were big, each day lit differently by the hues of sun and fading chlorophyll.

Try to remember when life was so tender,
That no one wept except the willow. . .

When he sings this, his lips are crooked, as if he’s trying to shape the W as he sings. He knows he can’t go back to that time when the only weeping was done by the willow, though he has returned to the farm he knew so well.

Melancholy – but resigned. Content, maybe, with the dreams he keeps beside his pillow.

Deep in December it’s nice to remember
The fire of September that made us mellow . . .

Here, he almost smiles. He can’t go back to that time, standing there in the field, dressed in his suit when back then he wore overalls without a shirt on underneath. He is content with the memories he has. It’s time to go.

A Flyover Confession

I have to make a flyover country confession: I do not know what a rising senior or a rising junior is. And I read that a lot in the personality profiles written by Alan’s CSPA students.

Must be an East Coast thing. Maybe they’re all into astrology – that’s the only thing that immediately came to mind with all of these rising juniors and seniors. Maybe it’s good they’re rising, in the house of Gemini or whatever. Better to be rising than descending, and better yet to be rising without colliding with Saturn, if I understand astrology at all.

But no. I’m not convinced it’s astrology. So I made the confession to one of Alan’s students while reading his (or her) essay: Don’t assume people understand the jargon.

Does that apply even if it’s a regional thing? Depends on the case, I suppose. We out here don’t bother to explain what we mean by pop, even though more than half the nation (erroneously) refers to pop as soda. Or coke. We just assume everyone will know what we’re talking about, and if they don’t well, bub, they’d better learn. So it is with rising seniors and juniors. They who be back East know what this means, to be a rising senior or a rising junior. So be it.

That’s a minor issue, of course.

What I’m seeing of greater concern is the same thing I’m seeing in my BYU-Idaho students: Fear of detail. And – surprisingly – what we in Mormon Country call testimony bearing.

Testimony bearing and fear of detail go hand in hand. A writer wants to say good things about a person – say that Alan Murray, for example, is a humble and hard-working person. That’s great. But the detail to back up that testimony is lacking, if there are even hints of the detail at all.

There’s also a fear of follow-up. So a student says he enjoys coaching kids, or that he is in a band. Those facts are duly written down and noted in the story. But rarely is it explained why the student enjoys coaching kids, or what kinds of band the student is in. There’s a veneer of detail, but nothing you can sand through without revealing the Formica beneath.

So Alan’s students are getting the same advice I’m giving mine: Elaborate. Bear your testimony, but then have the detail to back up what you say.

Alan Murray: Detecting Gorillas All Week Long

Within the next hour and a half, Uncharted's Alan Murray will be detecting gorillas. Much better than Dr. Bunsen Honeydew here.

Gorilla detecting is a good metaphor for what Alan is doing this week. In case you've forgotten, Alan is teaching a week-long writing and leadership seminar at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association's summer workshop series. The gorilla detecting comes in as Alan teaches his students that we have to go beyond the obvious and stretch ourselves as writers and communicators to succeed in any kind of writing endeavor, not just journalism. (I wish I'd realized the importance of the communication part when I was a journalist; that would have helped avoid several unpleasant problems, namely my exit from the industry in 2005.)

We've had a buy month, getting Alan ready for this week's adventure. And we're not done. Andrew will work as a Skyped-in guest speaker on coordinating writing with visuals, while Dave will also Skype in to talk about SEO and other ways to generate web traffic. I'll be working with Alan all week as well, offering feedback on his students' writing. It's going to be a challenging week.

Alan is up to it, through. He's good at detectoring gorillas.

By George, I Think He's Got It

Well, it appears that Alan is prepared for his stint – starting next week – at the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s summer workshop.

The whole Uncharted team has worked pretty hard over the last month helping him get ready, and I think we’ve got a pretty comprehensive program put together. His students ought to leave the week-long conference with a lot of valuable information and I’ll be surprised if the Columbia folks don’t ask Alan to come back and teach again.

Our crown jewel this week is a completely fleshed-out schedule, with much of the lecturing ready to go. Not that he’s going to do lots of lecturing – there’s going to be lots of hands-on stuff for his students to do.

A Washed-Up Journalist Heads, in Spirit, to CSPA

Back in April 2005, I washed my hands of newspaper journalism.

Sick to death of it I was. And even with the prospect of underemployement as a hod carrier (to be followed up by stints at call centers and Target) I was glad to be out of the profession.

I’ve grown up a bit since then. Well, a lot.

I now realize I frittered away opportunities in the field. Still, I’m happy I left. I’m enjoying my career as a technical writer and have turned my desire to write into a handful of blogs, a strong presence at Uncharted and, at last count, a 114,000-word fantasy novel that I’m in the midst of editing. Also during that time I earned a Masters degree and, through Uncharted, have become associated with people who want my input on all sorts of things, writing being only one of many. I’m also teaching an online English class at Brigham Young University-Idaho, hopefully shaping students’ minds to become better writers, or at least not to regard writing with fear and loathing. I’ve also grown closer to my wife, with whom I collaborate at Uncharted, and who is going through the same masters program I finished in 2009.

And thanks to Uncharted – more specifically, to Alan Murray, our illustrious CEO and Sith Lord – I’m kinda in a back-doorsy way getting back into journalism.

For the past two years, Alan has traveled to Columbia University’s Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s spring and fall workshops, to teach high school students there everything he knows about writing for the web, collaborating with people dispersed across the globe, and other such stuff. Now this summer they’ve asked him to come back for a full week to teach a workshop on newspaper writing for the web.

He wants me to help.

All I can say is yikes. Two rubes like us working together to present something at Columbia. He’s feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overwhelmed. Yet excited and challenged at the same time.

I’m sure some of my compatriots in my former field of employment would raise their eyebrows at my participation in this. No matter. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’ve changed for the better, and don’t mind saying that, though I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

So here’s a rough draft of what we’re thinking:

Supermoon

Okay, so the so-called Supermoon is a little bit underwhelming. But you know what? It gave me the excuse to take Michelle's tripod outside and try my hand at some nighttime photography.

Yes, I know I'm light years (ha!) away from being any good at this, but for a boob who has only a rudimentary idea of how photography works, let alone toying with the thought of taking photos in difficult situations, I'm pretty pleased with the result you see here.

I learned a little bit about metering (hear that, Alan? some of your teachings have sunk in!) and read a bit more about ISO and shutter speeds and the adjustments thereof. I'm still going to have to do lots of work on this, but I think maybe I'm not too far gone to give up hope.

I know this is a crappy photo, but I can at least point out a few things that make me like it. The tree is almost in focus, and I like the onion-style concentric rings around the hazy moon -- did I mention it was a bit hazy when I took these photos?

Here's another one, kinda artsy-fartsy. I think it's not too bad.

Prayer to the Idaho Internet Gods

I got this e-mail from my friend Alan in Utah late last night:

OH IDAHO INTERNET GOD!

WE PRAY THEE TO

WATCH OVER OUR UPLOADS

AND TO HELP US

WATCH VIDEO AT THE

VERY LEAST IN SLOW MOTION

PLEASE BE KIND TO US

IN THIS OUR HOUR OF NEED

He says this only half in jest, as there have been many times when our good ol' "Idaho Internet" has made Skype calls and photo transfers and even simple e-mails a rather difficult thing to accomplish. That has been so thusfar this weekend, with the Internet basically pooping out on us last night and the night this morning and even part of my knee.*

So last night I did the stupid, standard things I have to do to try to ensure the problem isn't on our end. That involves the industry standard of unplugging everything, waiting a few minutes, then plugging everything back in again. Didn't work. So then I ran virus scanners on both computers, found problems on both, cleaned them up, then tried again. No luck, except for now, obviously. I think, given that the service pooped out at night and at about the same time each night, that they're doing some kind of work on the network locally. Or all those schlubs at BYU-Idaho are streaming their Netflix and hogging all the bandwidth.

But now everything is working again. Not sure if they network fixing is done, if the students have stopped the streaming, or if the prayer to the Idaho Internet gods worked. I'm putting my money on the prayer, actually.

*"As the Stomach Turns," episode I'm not sure. You have to watch BOTH PARTS.