One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down.

George Orwell’s 1984. I read it in middle school on the edge of my teenage years just when I was just becoming politically aware, and it just cracked the world open for me.

What one detail do you still recall from that book?

People forget that it’s a love story.

The book I imagined/imagine living inside of is,

Well, I remember seeing the back cover of Shel Silverstein’s Where The Sidewalk Ends, and reading his bio, which ends with, “He also writes songs, draws cartoons, sings, plays the guitar, and has a good time,” and thinking, that’s exactly who I want to be.

The one book I have most often re-read is,

I like to re-read the intro to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. There’s a plain-spoken Midwestern-ness in his voice that makes me want to write.

The kinds of books I am most appreciating or seeking these days are, 

I like books with tight, short chapters and snappy sentences. It’s a rare song that needs more than 3 minutes, a rare movie that needs more than 90 minutes, and a rare book that needs more than 300 pages.

I will read anything written by, 

Lynda Barry.

Survey: Roughly what % of books do you read digitally versus in paper? (What’s your preferred reader?)

Oh, it really depends. I’d say it’s split into thirds — 1/3 paper, 1/3 on my Kindle, 1/3 on my iPhone. I buy a lot of books from Amazon, a lot of used books from Bookpeople here in Austin, and I download a lot of ebooks from the Austin Public Library. What I’d really like to do is read a paperback in bed at night, and then have the ebook version on my phone throughout the day. Vinyl records these days come with a download code — why can’t hardbacks and paperbacks do the same?

In a sentence or two, what’s your forecast for the future of publishing?

Writers will keep writing, readers will keep reading. The writers who succeed will be the ones who establish and keep a direct connection with their readers. The publishers who succeed will be the ones who figure out how to connect their writers with more readers without getting in the way.

What one thing do you hope your patch of the planet (readers) come away with in reading your books?

Creativity is for everyone.

If you had five days off to read books next week, which books would you at last read?

I would finish Studs Turkel’s Working.

The little-known book I most relish and champion is,

Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Lynda Barry’s What It Is.

The book I am most embarrassed/proud [specify] to say I’ve never read is, 

Never proud that I’ve never read a book. Embarrassed by all the classics I’ve missed — but there’s still time!

If I had the time, talent, grit, and support, the book I would write is,

The one I’m working on now.

Check out more from Austin Kleon at http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/611119374

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Best of chums

Note: I’m taking a decidedly personal detour today in honor of mothers nurturing imaginations everywhere.

My mother made the most of her means and time to give my imagination and spirit an education beyond school. A smile and an easy laugh forever cast to the world, she would never let on to her tow-headed boy the troubles she had with my father or how most of the money he earned from his charm and wit as a top-selling advertising radio rep in Dallas went to entertaining. At least not until years later when I probed.

She worked a few half days and full days as my grandfather’s secretary at his Tandy Quick Print Shop. During the summer, I’d often go with her. My grandfather, a gentle, reserved, and retired Air Force Lieutenant, would give me a spot at a table with a stack of drawing pads and pencils. For hours, I drew elaborate illustrated stories about spies, or I’d sneak a few pages of whatever book my mother was reading – Helter Skelter, Jaws.

Author with signature girlish looks and polyester shirt opened to show off his manly chest (my first brand)

Somehow she raised me on her own terms and not according to the dictates of West Side Fort Worth. By the time I was five, she let me grow my blond hair long to my shoulders and wear the red and yellow paisley pants I had chosen for the class picture. My friends’ mothers would call her, I would find out years later, and ask her if she would please cut my hair short because now Patrick or Joe or Kenneth also wanted his hair to be long like Jeffrey’s.

My mother’s reply: “So, let him grow his hair long.”

And she picked up on my quiet ways.

* * *

The real education came on Mondays off. My mother had Mondays off, a day she’d often spend with me. Each Monday during a string of summers, she gave me my choice of outings in Fort Worth. The Kimball Art Museum – the marvel of a museum designed by Louis Kahn. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The Amon Carter Museum of Western Art. The Japanese Gardens. The Botanical Gardens. The Fort Worth Zoo. The Museum of Natural Science and History. The library. The Will Rogers Coliseum flea market where I could spend my allowance on Hardy Boys books.

I favored the Japanese Gardens. I learned to love carved paths aimed to put you in intentional relation to water and sand, fish and flowers. She would let me roam and find my favorite spot before the sand meditation garden. And for a few minutes, I could taste what it felt like to sit with one’s self, alone, before a garden designed just for that.

At the Modern, we’d stand before, say, a canvas of flies painted in red up close. And then the blue flies. And the yellow flies. We’d try to meet each painting or sculpture on its own terms but at the time we usually couldn’t help but smirk. But we’d always return to see what was next.

Among museums, the Kimball stood out as my favorite outing. At the time, the permanent collection favored mostly Baroque canvases with a few 19th-century Romantic landscapes.

By the time I was ten, I knew intimately many of the Kimball’s permanent paintings. I knew the natural landscapes where I wanted to live. I had seen Picasso’s notebook sketches at a special exhibit – even though we had to leave early because my friend Sam and I couldn’t stop giggling at the sketches of all the naked women. And I knew who Louis Kahn was. And I had my own favorite – its one Picasso, l’Homme Avec Une Pipe.

The two of us, side-by-side, would stand before the Cubist canvas or any other canvas for several minutes.

“What do you see?” my mother would ask in her honeyed voice.

“A man. And there’s the pipe. It looks like pieces of broken glass.”

We’d stand before an 18th-century painting of Christ.

“What do you see in the margins?”

“A lamb.”

We’d stand before an 18th-century floor-to-ceiling canvas of cherubs floating above a figure from Greek mythology.

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know. What do you think it means?”

We’d stand before a 19th-century Romantic landscape.

“How do you feel?”

“Peaceful. Like I want to live there.”

To my friends, I was never bookish, yet my favorite days during the school year were spent often faking being sick so I could stay home in bed with my sketchpads, pencils, notebooks, and books. And I spent my afternoons wandering the woods wherever I could find them in a growing city still wanting to feel like a small town.

* * *

College boy comes home for a picnic.

When I journeyed as far away as Austin to The University of Texas, I spent many of my nights trying to study economics and other mind-numbing topics in the art library. Inevitably, I would wander from my books and find a large coffee table book called, simply, Picasso. Page after page showed the shirtless artiste in an open atelier, that wondrous look still in his eyes, that look that said, “This is the life.”

Some thirty years later, Kay Larson has asked me how I knew so much about Dadaism and Futurism and John Cage. My friend, artist Julianne Swartz, asked me just last night around a campfire what my training in art history was.

The mother will not forgive the author for publishing this one. Circa, smart-mouthed 13-year-old.

I don’t remember when or why those summers stopped. It was around the time I was 12 or 13 and likely started to outgrow my mother for a while. Around the time my mother said to my father, “Enough” and left him.

But before that happened and before I left home and left Texas, my mother would make sure I knew what was important. That art and the imagination have value even if you don’t “get” it. That solitude in the natural world has value.

I learned that if I kept tending to my imagination that I, too, could “live the life” however I created it. And I’ve come as close as I will to living in that natural landscape.

I learned how to ask the critical questions. What do you see? What do you see in the margins? How does it make you feel? What do you think it means?

And she made sure I knew that someone in the world actually cared enough to listen to my attempts to answer.

To anyone who has given someone else, especially a child, those or comparable gifts,

Happy Mother’s Day.

What we long for is a voice.

Some of us long for a voice. That vehicle that assures we’re heard. That something which translates our heart’s rumble with rhythm and from it makes music and melody that moves, awakens someone else.

A true vocalist has her own signature voice that can translate beyond self-expression. Think, Billie Holiday. Think, Janis Joplin. Think, Rebecca Martin.

Let me tell you about my friend, Rebecca Martin.

Of Martin’s voice, Nate Chinen writes in The New York Times,

“She can make the same phrase seem philosophical and conversational, and about as natural as sighing.”

“A Voice That Leaps Between Genres” headlined the Times recently after the release of her and legendary bassist husband Larry Grenadier’s latest CD, Twain. She has crafted her genre-crossing voice that inspires others to do likewise.

Once with EMI, Martin records now with Sunnyside and on her own, six albums/CDs to her credit. Martin has performed at Carnegie Hall, at venues around the world, and at neighborhood venues to raise money for people and organizations she believes in.

And it’s those last venues Martin would say, if asked, are most important.

Several years ago, when a neighborhood convenience store owner in Martin’s adopted hometown of Kingston, New York, refused to stop selling knives to youth, Martin rallied her neighbors and ultimately helped them let their voices be heard to the community leaders on a variety of issues.

I asked this charming, innovative vocalist what books have mattered most to her. I’m happy to share with you the Books That Matter to Rebecca Martin. You’ll find out whose lover she might have been, what kind of books really irritate her, and more.

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down.

That’s a tough one because there are several books that I can think of immediately that have made a profound impact. However, one that comes to mind and that I suspect hasn’t come up so often in pieces such as this are May Sarton’s Journals, specifically ‘Journal of a Solitude’.

It was this book that introduced me to her world of journals where I was struck by a common theme for her at 70 and beyond. Sarton honestly wrote about her continued struggle with questions that she had had since a young girl. There were incremental breakthroughs on them due to her honest search and wonderfully rich life; however, she remained snagged by them until the very end.

This discovery encouraged me to go back to read my own journals, as I don’t do so very often. I found that I had the very same themes running  throughout and up until this very day. I hadn’t noticed that so much before.

What one detail do you still recall from that book?

What struck me was her youthfulness in later years which is commonplace. I’ve heard over and over again from those in their winter life that their bodies have slowed them down some but their perception of themselves were “that of a 30 year old.” I wonder what that feels like. At 44 and in pretty good health, my body and mind are still strong and working in tandem.

It would be thrilling (and equally daunting, too) to make it to 70 and beyond so to experience what it is that she describes here for myself.

Without a doubt, I’ll be out in the garden tending to the plants as she did if I can.

The book I imagined/imagine living inside of is,

Anais Nin’s “Delta of Venus”.   I would have been Henry Miller’s lover too given the chance.

The character I still imagine being or being friends or seeking counsel from is,

I’ve never had  fantasies of being or being friends with a character in a novel, poem or short story.  However, if I were to solicit counsel, it would surely by from Michel de Montaigne. He got me at “What do I know?”

The one book I have most often re-read is,

That might be Ibsen’s play ‘A Dolls House”. I had seen it first on stage decades ago, and it really struck me. There are societal ‘markers’ that a woman is expected to achieve.  After which, you are off the map so to speak and generally at a pretty young age.  What do you do after you achieve marriage and children?  Who are you really after you have done your ‘duty’? It sounds crass because it is. How do you get to your personal underlying power and why are women encouraged to spend their lives hiding and even hating it?

The kinds of books I am most appreciating or seeking these days are,

The same as it has always been. Journals. Short stories. Poems.  I am a fan of reflections. Of the mundane that is deeply profound and simple. I love the space and beats in between words and sentences.

The kinds of books that most irritate me are,

I mean no offense to anyone when I say that self-help books are particularly irritating to me. Most irritating that comes to mind would have to be “Conversations with God”.

I will read anything written by Herman Hesse

Survey: Roughly what % of books do you read digitally versus in paper?

I have to hold a book and turn its pages. That’s a part of the fun.

In a sentence or two, what’s your forecast for the future of publishing?

What is old will be new again.

If you had five days off to read books next week, which books would you at last read?

I would go back and re-read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and East of Eden.

Which book would you want every (child/boy/girl/woman/man/daughter/son/business person/thought leader_____ – you choose the category) to read? Why?

Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”  I think it is one of the more insightful and gentle texts on all things that matter most.

The little-known book I most relish and champion is,

I particularly love the poetry of Derek Walcott. His collected poems from 1948 – 1984 are lovely. The piece “Volcano” has always moved me.

The book I am most embarrassed  to say I’ve ever read is Monica Lewinsky’s Story. I confess.

If I had the time, talent, grit, and support, the book I would write is, Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”

Check out more from Rebecca at http://www.rebeccamartin.com.

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Abby Kerr makes branding artful, meaningful, and – most of all – effective.

But it wasn’t always so.

Abby’s journey has taken her from English teacher to cool boutique owner to founder of her one-woman show Abby Kerr, Inc. to her latest venture, The Voice Bureau – a boutique branding agency that helps entrepreneurs and micro-businesses show up with a signature vision and brand.

Abby’s take on branding captivates me for three reasons.

Taste - Abby’s artful attention to detail helps me and my patch of the planet understand why certain iconography works or flops for certain messages and messengers.

Hootzpah - Abby critiques her field and chintzy trends within it. She calls people – usually not by name – on their stuff. As she said in one interview, “Haphazardry in branding has to go.” (Plus, she admits to being decidedly un-hip, which endears instantly to my heart.)

Empathy - Abby’s perspective is research-based + heart-based, a combo we also respect at Tracking Wonder. That combo lets her critique and advise from a decidedly empathetic stance versus a purely subjective stance that equates to, “Well, this is what I think….”

I’m pleased to share with this language-loving entrepreneur’s take on Books That Matter to her. You learn about her girlhood fantasies of blond island boys, the difference between an off-brand blond Oreo book and a Laduree Macaron book, and more.

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down.

One of the first books that cracked me open as a reader, and made me see so much more of what the novel, as form, could hold, was Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I wept through so much of that book. Her poetic command of the English language is formidable. Her characters are like us: human, flawed, painfully beautiful, and yet completely mysterious. That was the book that made me want to write my own stories. I still think all the time of Morrison’s quote: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

The book I imagined/imagine living inside of is (as an adolescent), the Prince Edward Island communities where L.M. Montgomery’s novels were set: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and the rest of the Anne series in particular.

Gosh. I truly thought I was going to grow up, live in a huge rambling old Victorian house in PEI, write novels from my kitchen table while my seven children and doting neighbors held court around me (I know), and marry a sturdy blond Island boy who was putting himself through medical school picking oranges in the Summers (on PEI?) while wearing low-slung burlap pants held up by suspenders. Ah, childhood fantasies.

The kinds of books I am most appreciating or seeking these days are,

Books that take me outside of my default genre, which is contemporary women’s fiction with a literary sensibility. I know this isn’t that far outside, but I discovered Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL this past year (along with the rest of the literate universe) and now I’m turned on to psychological thrillers. (The ones that keep bloodshed to a minimum.) I just read her debut novel, SHARP OBJECTS, on a plane ride from Ohio to Washington. It made the time fly.

The kinds of books that most irritate me are women’s novels that feel hokey, cheap, and made of poor ingredients.

It’s like eating a generic brand sandwich cookie (like an off-brand blond Oreo) when what you really wanted was a Ladurée Macaron. There’s nothing wrong with light, formulaic, genre fiction — but please give contemporary female readers a little credit.

I will read anything written by,

Jeffrey Eugenides (Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, The Marriage Plot) or Elin Hilderbrand (my favorite beach read author — smart, sexy, intelligent fiction that whisks you right into Summer and into other people’s relationships).

Survey: Roughly what % of books do you read digitally versus in paper? (What’s your preferred reader?)

For someone who lives so much of her professional life digitally, I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve read digitally — seriously! I’m a paper book girl from way back. If I’m desperate to start on a book today (and don’t want to wait for shipping), I’ll buy it for my Kindle app for iPhone, but I actually enjoy reading that way. Reading stories or poems needs to be a much more tactile experience for me.

Check out Abby’s current project, Empathy Marketing,  a codified, holistic framework for identifying, connecting with, and converting the Right People Most Likely To Buy from you into clients who are glad and ready to pay for the excellent work you have to offer.

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The Paradox of Loving What You Do

A funny paradox: We love to love what we do. Yet, we sometimes fear that if we learn too much about how what we do works, the love will vanish. As if increased behind-the-scenes know-how spoils the innocent magic. And if we become conscious of how what we do affects others, then we fear becoming manipulative.

Yet, can you imagine magician David Copperfield or filmmaker Wes Anderson being able to enchant us if they did not love what they do and aspire to learn how what they do affects their audience and do the work necessary to make the magic happen?

We know how art we love captivates us. And yet we’re not always willing to admit that we can learn without becoming cynical and that we can become adept and craft-conscious in our art and business art without becoming manipulative.

I see numerous aspiring artists and aspiring business artists tripped up and stuck in this paradox. Otherwise talented artists, coaches, and freelancers also get hung up on their own baggage labeled “marketing” and “branding.” (For the record, been there.) With the sold-out Your Captivating Book Mentorship Program about to get under way, I’m wondering more about what trips us up in the challenging process of art-making and artisan business-making.

(By the way, I’d appreciate your perspective in the comments below because your perspective broadens mine.)

For the Love of It

A while back, I worked with a client who loved to write her salacious true stories – Fifty Shades of Nonfiction Grey, in essence – and share them with her writing peers who also love to “pour it out” on the page.

Nothing wrong, per se, with writing to process and expose the 50 ways you had sex. In fact, Steve Almond offers a sound account of why writing workshops are on the rise while therapy is in decline. In my darkest storms, I’ve turned to journaling and dream cataloging as lighthouse activities.

But here’s where the client and I got tripped up. Whenever I mentioned craft or rewriting to design an experience for her readers, she took this as talk about “writing to get published,” which equated with something inauthentic, manipulative.

What she loved was the ecstasy of the emotional outpouring. And her peers applauded her for her vulnerability and rawness. Where did I go awry? I wondered.

Around the same time, a second client aspired to develop a blog where she could share her writings with her modest-sized audience. Yet, she similarly bristled when I tried to help her brand her blog in a way that might engage and attract more of the people she wanted to engage. This is what she asked for, yet once we tried it didn’t feel authentic to her.

The first client wouldn’t embrace that most writing is rewriting for an experience beyond the writer’s own gratification, and the second client would not embrace that branding can be a creative, authentic process.

On one hand, maybe both clients wished to remain amateurs in the purest sense of the word. “Amateur” from “amore” as in “one who loves process for the sake of process.” Amateurs love the fun of what they do. No harm there.

And anyone who moves from amateur to apprentice to artist to maestro would be wise to take with them their amateur’s heart – and beginner’s mind.

Amateurs play obsessively for long hours at what they do. But they often resist direction, guidance, any hint of critique for fear the fun will be spoiled. This amateur bubble is part of The Apprenticeship Gap.

Yet I’m also confident I went awry a few times in how I framed our work together.

The Missing Frame

The missing reframe came up recently with another client. This client is a brilliant PhD practitioner with a manuscript well on its way, an excellent scene editor on her team, and an intriguing account of her lived experience.

We’ve worked for a couple of months to shape that account into a Story for a memoir and publisher-ready proposal. Before our third meeting, I had pored over another 50 or 60 pages and had rewritten her proposal overview to help frame the core Story and its singular elegant idea.

Yet, during our meeting I would hear – and mirror back to the client – her words about “trying to force a story for the marketplace” and forcing a story to fit “a linear hero’s journey.” Her frames and words, not mine.

And, finally, what I thought had been obvious I apparently spelled out in a way that got through.

We explored the core purpose of Story and how it differs from a Personal Account.

A Personal Account is written mostly for the writer’s own therapeutic, meaning-making needs. Parts of it might ring as “authentic” and “raw” to people who like to read other people’s diaries and journals.

Story, on the other hand, is shaped with the aim to captivate, reward, and move an audience. To give them an experience worth having.

That process can be incredibly therapeutic for the writer, but that’s not the main aim.

The client lit up. She finally got it, she said. All of the hard work we were doing had a purpose that meant something to her – to deliver a rewarding experience to her patch of the planet, the readers she may never meet but who will be served and moved by her hard work. The people who will be so moved they can’t wait to tell others about it. The aim wasn’t just to make a lot of money by trying to manipulate consumers in the marketplace.

And the same is true for business artists who get that we live in a very different kind of economy – a whole different way of exchange and commerce – than that we grew up in.

The aim is for changed looks on people’s faces. A changed way of thinking. A changed way of feeling more alive. For a moment, a taste of self-transcendence.

Elevation Not Manipulation

We do have to be careful not to put the market before our creative or humane intentions or else our brand, book, or business will lose its center. The Tao of Authentic Marketing for Creatives can be helpful here.

An artist remains devoted to the craft sometimes even at the expense of the market.

A business artist and a business artisan remain devoted to ideals of enchanting and elevating their patch of the planet sometimes at the expense of common sense.

Does this make sense to you? Are there exceptions? I really would appreciate your perspective in the comments below.

But crafting a captivating book, brand, performance, talk, or presentation is not about manipulation. Learning the craft of writing, the craft of artisanal branding, or the craft of platform-building is about designing experiences that reward and move an audience – customers, readers, viewers, consumers.

Pam Slim said it in terms I’ve expressed in other (wordier) ways: It’s not about you.

It’s about engagement, enchantment, elevation – all of which are greater than you.

There it is: The aim to create and to brand is to elevate, not manipulate.

Delight & Perverse Pleasure is Not Fun – or, Create Like a Motherfu%$er

Hours upon hours of work to enchant and elevate a stranger for a few minutes or a few hours? That’s what artists, business artists, and business artisans do. Doing so requires courage – wit, grit, heart, and support – to stand up for the story you, your book, your brand must tell.

And it means we’re called to muster the courage to create like a Motherfu$5er as I heard Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestseller Wild, say recently in Woodstock.

It means, as artists and business artists – or apprentice artists and apprentice business artists – we sweat the deliberate practice. What is deliberate practice? It’s not Morning Pages. Research by K. Anders Ericsson from 1993 onwards and those who have followed him point out that this kind of practice is

consistent

regular

performed in solitude

guided with feedback by a mentor,

and, well, not fun.

Not fun? The practice is sort of grueling. But for artists and business artists, there’s a sort of perverse pleasure in the practice. There’s a delight in the details, in the physical, sensory experience of our media and in the intellectual stimulation.

There’s a perverse pleasure in devoting time and space to mixing the medicine that only you (and your team) can deliver to your patch of the planet in your signature way. Mad scientists, all of us. Now that is a perversity I can indulge in.

On the business artist’s quest, too, she can look back at her work even a year ago and see how far she’s come. An inevitable self-admiration arises.

And every once in a while, there’s just utter astonishment that she is engaged in work she still loves, in work she still aspires to improve in beyond his comfort zone, and in work that does, in fact, elevate her patch of the planet.

This is more than fun.

And that’s a wonder.

Todd Kashdan, a globe-trotting speaker and dynamic professor at George Mason University, is a wonder-tracker for whom I have great respect. Todd ’s first book Curious: Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life shows how wonder’s more active cousin can boost health, relationships, creativity, and productivity.  As a thought leader in his field of positive psychology, he rocks the boat fearlessly to assure that useful – and accurate – ideas get advanced.

Todd’s latest book co-edited with Joe Ciarrochi is Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology: The Seven Foundations of Well-Being (Context Press 2013). It’s the first book to bring together the best from the fields of positive psychology and of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help people – from prisoners to Fortune 500 workers to children – realize their greatest potential.

But here’s why I especially respect Todd: a glimpse at his Facebook page also often shows Todd in full curious rapture outdoors wrestling and playing with his two girls. A good sign of someone who walks the talk.

Today Todd tells us the Books That Matter to him. You’ll get a glimpse of the high-concept, time-tripping novels that formed this young mind devoted to the human mind’s flexibility, and you’ll find out the one reason to get an education. 

Books That Matter is our 8-week series that showcases influential wonder-trackers’ relationships with books. We’re featuring people from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. May it inspire you writers, creatives, and thought leaders wanting to write your own books that matter.
- Jeffrey

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down. (“required” response)

The Man in the High Castle by Philip Dick. Dick wrote books that had such a bizarre landscape, toppling preconceived notions of the world. You could put me in a sensory deprivation tank for 5 years and hook up an IV filled with ketamine and I would never arrive at Dick’s vantage point. I lived in his worlds throughout grade school.

What one detail do you still recall from that book?

So the premise of the book is what would have happened if the Axis powers won World War II? Germany had a colony on the east coast of Japan and on the west coast of the United States with a netherland of unknown rules and rituals in the middle. I remember how Caucasians pretended to adopt Japanese mannerisms to fit in, holding in their emotions, trying to squelch their desire to be independent, and even using the I Ching in public prior to making everyday decisions. It was a fascinating experiment with perspective-taking.

The book I imagined/imagine living inside of is Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

Who wouldn’t want to experiment with being unstuck in time such that all moments are accessible and you randomly get pushed and pulled from one to another. I love maintaining my image of childhood, the present, and the future simultaneously.

The character I still imagine being or being friends or seeking counsel from is Felix Krull from The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years by Thomas Mann,

because he had the ability to alter his identity, influence and persuade other people at will. This book is a masterpiece and it hurts that Mann never finished it.

The one book I have most often re-read is The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 

because it is a treatise on critical thinking which is the only reason people need an education.

The kinds of books I am most appreciating or seeking these days are,

Historical novels (such as Devil in the White City) and futurist novels (such as Blueprints of the Afterlife).

The books that most irritate me are,

Out of Order: Stories from the History of the Supreme Court by Sandra Day O’Connor.

Sandra Day O’ Connor is an American icon and with three daughters, she is going to be a hero to them. The historical details are fantastic such as the origins of the surpreme court and how long it took to end up in a permanent place in Washington DC. Then there is O’Connor’s pilgrimage to John Marshall, the longest standing member of the supreme court and arguably the most important chief justice. And then there are the odd details about each president’s choices over the past 200 years. What irritated me about the book was the attempt to evade negative thoughts, feelings, and relationships during her tenure. The omission of nearly any information on Clarence Thomas is telling compared to the information on other justices that she worked with. Similarly, I was hoping for more historical information on Thurgood Marshall and his experience and strategies for coping with the difficult order of being the first black justice. I wanted the first hand account of the first woman on the court. She is an icon and her attempt to be politically correct and upbeat took away from the complexity of being a judge among strong personalities and the public spotlight. Future generations need to understand what she endured and how so that they never take their freedom for granted.

I will read anything written by Haruki Murakami.

Survey: Roughly what % of books do you read digitally versus in paper? (What’s your preferred reader?)

I prefer to read a paperbook and dog-ear pages and underline passages. I use my iPad kindle but its not nearly as pleasurable as paper. I want to see what my brain downloaded by walking past my bookcase on a daily basis.

I hope what my patch of the planet (my audience) gets from my books is,

 a sense of inspiration to deviate from their comfort zone and psychological biases. My goal is to increase people’s psychological flexibility.

Which book would you want every (child/boy/girl/woman/man/daughter/son/business person/thought leader – you choose the category) to read? Why?

The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse. Such a beautiful, creative story to explain how the search for meaning in life cannot be limited to intellectual pursuits. This is such an important lesson that we all have to learn and re-learn.

The little-known book I most relish and champion is, 

The Knife Man: Blood, Body Snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery by Wendy Moore.

If I had the time, talent, grit, and support, the book I would write is a parenting book for fathers.  

The big secret of parenting is that in every generation caregivers make it up as they go along. I would love to write a book that compiles the ideas people have given me over the years that fit with the complex, uncertain, mysterious world that we live in. But then again, anyone who thinks they are a parenting expert is, in my definition, not to be trusted. It’s the most rewarding, challenging, and meaningful endeavor and thus worthy of a few more books.

Buy a copy of Todd’s new book Mindfulness, Acceptance, and Positive Psychology for you or a practitioner who wants to help people be their best. Find out more about his work here.

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Share your comments, responses to the same questions, and questions for Todd here.

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down.

Oh how I love that phrase from Kafka, “the axe for the frozen sea within you.”

There are several books that come to mind: Pippi Longstocking really did this for me as a child. As an adult: Richard Leider’s Unpacking Your Bags: Lightening Your Load for the Rest of Your Life, about the ways in which we burden ourselves and weigh ourselves down; and James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games about whether we play to win and end the game (finite games) or play to learn and keep the game going (infinite games).

It opened a new world of intellectual pursuit for me, this big, erudite, difficult book. Gaddis was a genius. It’s not the easiest book to read–it takes effort. His breadth and depth of knowledge is unthinkable–the only parallel I’ve had since is novelist Richard Powers.

Gaddis wrote this book in the 1950s, and it still appears modern. The main conceit–a questioning of what is real and what is forged–is brilliantly done and has implications far beyond the realm of the story itself. In fact, as I answer this question, I am increasingly aware of how much Richard Powers’ novel, The Time of Our Singing, echoes these same conceits with its exploration of sampling.

I think it broke open “the frozen sea” in me because of its bigness: the very thought that a piece of fiction could be so much more was what broke me open. I loved that reading could be such an intellectual pursuit. And I ended up writing my dissertation on it, focusing on near recognitions of reality–a theme that comes up repeatedly in my work now. I have a podcast series called “The Recognitions” for this very reason. Patterns surfacing, the hopes we can recognize our way out of them rather than repeat our way out them. The pursuit of that moment, or the allowing that moment to occur, when we so identify with a work of art or literature that we claim it as our own–those recognitions are so powerful and we move so quickly we hardly claim them, or sit with them.

 What one detail do you still recall from that book? There is a character in the novel who so loves Dostoyevsky that he creates a book jacket for his copy of The Brothers Karamazov out of a paper bag, onto which he pastes a photo of himself in the place where the author photo belongs. That urgent identification with a piece of art–I can recognize it (pun intended). To this day, I have a photo of myself pasted on the back of my copy of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

The book I imagined/imagine living inside of was Encyclopedia Brown. I loved those books as a kid, trying to solve the mystery by simply listening and being present. I think Encyclopedia and I could have been good friends. Encyclopedia Brown was a mindfulness ninja, he was.

The character I still imagine being or being friends or seeking counsel from is Pippi Longstocking because, like her, I was a little red-headed kid with pigtails when I first read about her. She was strong, funny, quirky, kind, generous, non-conformist, and wise–everything I wanted to be and become. As an adult, I was in Stockholm for a conference in December 2001 and made a pilgrimage to Pippi’s creator, Astrid Lindgren’s, house. Because she was very ill at the time, I simply stood outside her house in the cold for a while in silent thanks, a gratitude vigil. She died a month later.

The kinds of books I am most appreciating or seeking these days are literary fiction and really smart, engaging young adult fiction that’s not just for kids and that expects a lot of its young readers.

I read to my young daughter, Tess, every night for at least 30 minutes at bedtime, and we are blazing through some amazing fiction like Keeper and The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson,  Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, and  Anything but Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin. Those last two feature kids with autism; Tess has just been diagnosed with Asperger’s, so she felt validated by those characters (in terms of novelist Walker Percy’s beautiful work on the concept of validation, a seeing myself in).

In terms of adult literary fiction, I host a 37days Book Club (https://www.smore.com/be7q-read-more-know-more) and our theme for 2013 is “Women’s Voices.” I’m reading things I have never read before, and might not ever read, and am loving it. One that comes to mind is Margaret Elphinstone’s The Sea Road, a novel based on the real life of Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, a Scandinavian women of the Viking age who sailed all over the North Atlantic from Iceland to Norway to Greenland and North America, and later on to Europe. Our conversation about it was fascinating–what stereotypes do we hold about Vikings that realizing a woman was among them as an equal was shocking?

I like complex tales that challenge me intellectually and morally. I love reading writing that has been honed and shaped and in which the writer obviously loves the very idea of language as a transmitter of meaning.

I will read anything written by novelist Richard Powers. Anything. He is a genius, and every sentence he writes is a spectacular example of what language can do. His novel about race, time, and music, “The Time of Our Singing,” is so well-crafted. I interviewed him after reading it, and asked if the book itself was built as a piece of music, and it was. He crafted it as a “rondo,” in which (for example) the note “A” is played repeatedly, but sounds different each time because it is juxtaposed with another note. So, in a rondo, that looks like this: AA, AB, AC, AD. In his novel, historical events are placed against different contexts and are recognizable and yet sound different each time we hear them: AA, AB, AC, AD. Genius.

I will also read anything by novelist Marilynne Robinson. Anything. She, like Powers, is a word master. Her novel, Housekeeping, is a wonder.

Roughly what % of books do you read digitally versus in paper? (What’s your preferred reader?) I am in deep, desperate love with the book as object, as a form. I’ve taken many book making classes. I love the tactile, the solid, the deep satisfaction of the book itself. I have the tiniest addiction to typography and paper. I have read a few book digitally, but for me, at least for now, it is about holding a paper vessel in which the words reside, like a ship setting sail.

What do you hope your patch of the planet gets from your books Life is a Verb and Creative is a Verb?

I hope what my patch of the planet (my audience) gets from my books is a big dose of self-worth, a lot of love and laughter and meaning, and the inspiration to love well, live fully, let go deeply, and make a difference in their tiny and important spin on this tiny planet.

If you had five days off to read books next week, which books would you at last read? 

I love this question! Let’s make this happen!

5. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (re-read)

The little-known book I most relish and champion is Art & Fear: On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland.And I tell a lot of people about this book as well–Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Patton. The other one that would have to be on this list is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. All three were game-changers for me: The first on the creative spirit, the second on change process, and the third on whether we play to win or play to learn.

If I had the time, talent, grit, and support, the book I would write is a series of children’s books about the core concepts I teach in my online courses for adults, and that I write about in my books for adults: playing to learn instead of playing to win; the power of a single intention instead of operating from split intentions; the power of being present instead of distracted; and the power to create rather than the power to acquire, to name a few.

When Keith Richards steps onto stage, a specific horde pays big bucks to be part of him and hear his inimitable riffs on the guitar. When David Sedaris steps onto stage, a smaller but sizable crowd pays a fair sum to be part of him and to hear his inimitable riffs from the page.

Both men – one a haggard warrior of a musician, the other a hilarious trooper of a writer – have built platforms, albeit in altogether different ways for different audiences. Neither of them likely heard the word “platform” when they each got their start – one at London’s Marque Club playing the blues in 1962, the other on NPR recounting his days as an elf in 1992. But they’ve each built one.

What is a platform? Why should an aspiring author, veteran author, or even entrepreneur care to build one?

What a Platform Is

First, let’s get clear about what a platform is and is not.

A platform involves the consistent actions an author and his or her team takes to reach, build, and engage the right audience. Give me the name of a successful author, and I’ll break down how her or his working platform has been built (including that of the authors who claim they’ve never thought about it).

Several authors, aspiring and veteran, get thrown off-center in the online-driven world of publishing and reading. Is there one attribute in a platform that’s the most important? I think so, but whether you’re an author or entrepreneur or creative in another field, I want to hear what you have to say in the comments below. 

What a Platform Is Not

Building a platform is not about throwing planks together in your back yard, getting a bullhorn, and screaming for your neighbors to come and hear you because you’ve finished the first draft of your book.

In other words, just putting up a snazzy website and buying 10,000 Twitter followers and blogging 4 times a week alone won’t a platform build. At least not a very viable one – whether for an individual or for a business. A senior-level executive from one of the top 6 publishing houses recently said at a publishing conference, point-blank, “We do know that inauthentic marketing strategies don’t work.”

You do have to step into the public world, but there’s no rule that says you must be utterly egotistical and attention-grabbing to do so well. In fact, for authors, it’s probably better that your platform be less about you and more about your work, your message, your story – with your persona mixed in. Unless you’re already a celebrity or unless your message is all about you.

3 Starting Planks

If you extend the metaphor of platform, then you grasp how building an author platform is about three qualities:

Visibility: Readers have to find you. There are integral and not-so integral ways to build visibility. There are effective and ineffective ways to build visibility. Hint: Drop the bullhorn.

Here’s the remarkable thing to consider: In the early 21st century, you have more opportunities than ever to engage your readers directly and in more avenues and venues than solely through print or even through digital readers.

Visibility Reframe: See “visibility” as an opportunity for more people to be served, captivated, provoked, and touched by your message or story.

Visibility Queries:

• What are all the ways your work could be found and seen online?
• List the small publications you could reach out to for shorter pieces. What conferences and events could you attend? Present at? Lots of events such as Patti Digh’s Design Your Life Camp and Wisdom 2.0 offer break-out sessions from participants. This means you think clearly about what general interest topics beyond your book you could speak about.
• List the non-writer groups and organizations you could start to connect with, people who might become readers whom you also could learn from.

New York Times best-selling memoirist Julie Metz, for instance, continues to build her platform with a stellar signature talk about changing course in midlife – a topic that grows out of her memoir Perfection.

Excellence: Whether you have an Ivy League degree or Nobel Prize or reality show (all helpful platform-builders), you still must learn to create an excellent book in your genre and field (or hire someone to write or co-write it for you). Neither Keith Richards nor Eric Clapton could get away with publishing a sub-par memoir. Richards’ A Life is exceptionally well-written, and openly co-written, and Stephen King favorably reviewed Clapton’s memoir Slow Hand in the New York Times. Hone your craft knowledge, build your chops, establish your creds.

Excellence Reframe: There’s no way around not producing an excellent book or eBook. If you’re new to writing a book or eBook, find the support and resources to up your knowledge of, for instance, how story design and story architecture work or how an idea can be conceived, shaped, and developed in book form. If you’re a veteran author but have not kept up with readers’ appetites in your genre, reach out to someone for perspective on your writing.

I emphasize “excellence” over “credibility” alone. For most authors, credibility arises out of consistent excellence on the page and in your field.

Engagement: Keith Richards is engaging on stage. David Sedaris is engaging on stage. Authors with platforms are engaging. Social media is one form. But there are also live and local ways to engage as well.

To what extent and how you need to engage your audience depends upon several factors such as your native strengths, your natural modes of influence, your background, and your field.

The engagement economy is not about being a social butterfly. It’s about having conversations that matter. It’s about inventing captivating ways to mix it up with readers and fans – your patch of the planet. Be bold and audacious. But be real.

Engagement Reframe: Discover and honor what you love in the potential exchange between you and readers besides it being about your being adored. Susan Orlean is a notorious Twitter fiend, especially since she moved from the city to New York’s Hudson Valley a few years ago (it can get lonely talking only to geese and ducks). Julie Powell’s Facebook page is rife with her signature wit (sarcasm?) and stances and questions. You don’t have to guess where Powell stands on certain issues – refreshing for many fans.

It’s obvious that Orlean and Powell each use these forums because they enjoy them - not because the forums are manipulative tools to sell books (although they do that, too).

What’s the Most Important Part?

I’ve watched authors, entrepreneurs, and author-entrepreneurs soar and crash. The difference? Over and over again, the best-sellers and mid-list books that continue to sell well (and I do watch the numbers) come from authors who have built a platform marked by the elements above and are infused with one other part.

Integrity. The audience trusts the author. The audience feels the engagement comes naturally and consistently from the author’s native strengths, natural modes of influence, and field. They don’t feel toyed with or manipulated.

These elements and more we call at Tracking Wonder a creative entrepreneur’s Core-Form.

Your Core-Form lays the foundation for a platform that can be built over the long run with integrity instead of a bullhorn.

There’s a lot more to building a viable platform than what I’ve introduced here, but this marks a start.

Ready to Step Up?

If you’re ready to step up and onto your platform on behalf of your book’s message or story and for your life’s next act, and if you’re curious about what your Core-Form might look like, then consider taking the final Mastermind Author spot in Your Captivating Book.

You do not have to be a “mastermind.” You simply have to be committed to pursuing your deep longing for this book and your platform.

An all-day Virtual Author’s Platform Retreat with 5 other committed writers +

Your very own 1:1 VIP Author Catalyst Day with me at a 19th-century castle in the Hudson Valley.

You will come away with a clear portrait of yourself as an influencer for the good and how to apply  the science of creative branding & platform-building to an action plan.

And you also receive one of my signature editorial reviews of your manuscript and/or proposal (up to 150 double-spaced pages).

You think you don’t deserve it? What about your book’s message or story? What about the patch of the planet that might be served and salved? Do they deserve it?

Think about it.

Then contact me today. Registration closes April 20.

Update: The Mastermind spot is claimed. However, we do have two Scribe spots left – for less than the cost of a Mac laptop (which, ahem, is a machine not a mentor).

I can see you standing up there and standing for what you believe in.

DROP BY

What’s your take? What element do you consider to be the most essential for an author platform to be successful and gratifying over the course of several years? Share your thoughts and examples below.

Grateful to run with you,

Jeffrey

For years, Julie Metz thought she lived the perfect life – the perfect marriage, perfect brownstone, perfect career, perfect family. She tells her story of betrayal and renewal  in her New York Times best-selling memoir Perfection.

Where some people would cower to tell the story, Julie mustered both the courage and the art to shape a story that has touched tens of thousands of women and men.

Julie’s eye for detail also translates to her first career – as graphic designer and book designer. She’s the artistic mind behind the covers of books such as Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Charlie Baxter’s Burning Down the House, and even her own book’s, well, perfect cover.

She works with authors, both veteran and new, traditionally published and self-published, who know that, in fact, people do judge a book by its cover.

I had the honor to work with Julie in the early days of her writing life to shape the story and proposal that would become Perfection, and I’m delighted to share with you today this book-lover’s reflections on Books That Matter.

What one book most took off the top of your head (Dickinson on poetry) or was “the axe for the frozen sea within” you (Kafka) or otherwise just changed something profound within you? What did it do for you? Maybe a book that lit you up as a child or that turned you on as a young adult or last week that salved some pain or turned your thinking upside-down.

I remember when I stumbled upon James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at a local bookstore on Broadway. I think I was about 16. That book spoke to the confusion I felt about my family and history and every other source of angst a teenager could have, as well as the yearning to make some kind of difference with my life. I still have my original copy. I re-read it recently and it still blows me away.

A book I imagined living inside of was Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Because who doesn’t want to grow up inside a crumbling mess of an old castle? When I read the book now, I acknowledge a deep appreciation for the comforts of central heating and decent plumbing.

The one book I have most often re-read is Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

A fossilized English teacher nearly ruined Jane Austen for me in high school (we had to diagram her sentences!), but I rediscovered her on a family vacation when I’d forgotten Kurt Vonnegut at home. There is something deeply comforting and hopeful in this love story of second chances, not to mention the beautiful writing itself. When I’m feeling especially gloomy I might reach for Pride and Prejudice instead — more laughs there. When I’ve re-read all of Jane Austen, I quickly move on to E.M. Forster.

Lately I am seeking books that are something out of my usual zone. I read mostly fiction, but recently I read The Emperor of All Maladies, about the history of cancer, a biography, as the author subtitles it. Not a topic you think you want to read about, but I found the book riveting. It’s the kind of book that makes you feel smarter when you are done, but it also happens to be a surprising page-turner.

The books that irritate me are pretentious or manipulative.

I hate feeling like a toy in the hand of an author who is advertising how much smarter he is than his readers. I hate feeling like a toy in general. That will happen anyway, but I want that process to be smooth and unseen. If I feel it coming, the pleasure of reading is lost. There are a few books I’ve actually hurled across the room after forty pages.

Roughly what per cent of books do you read digitally versus in paper? (What’s your preferred reader?)

I read 100% paper books. I do not own a reader. But judging from my own casual survey on the subway, I see that folks love their Kindles and iPads. I like books. I like the feel of paper, the smell of ink, the crinkle of pages as I turn them. I spend too much of my day in front of a screen. I don’t want to curl up in bed with another one, however cool. And I worry that we are damaging our eyes and brains with so much screen time. But I know that I represent an ever-shrinking population.

In a sentence or two, what’s your forecast for the future of publishing?

Eventually most everyone will read digitally until paper books become nearly extinct, a quaint artifact. Perhaps there will be isolated communities of holdouts who keep guard over their paper book libraries. Until some terrible calamity occurs, such as a global power disaster. Then everyone will dig around for some paper books to read, so they don’t go crazy with boredom and screen withdrawal. People with secret stashes of books will open shops called bookstores. Sounds like the plot of a science fiction story I should write.

I hope readers discover from my book Perfection that it is possible to reinvent your life no matter your age or circumstances.

It will not be easy and the path will not be straight, but you can make something positive from challenging times.

If you had five days off to read books next week, which books would you at last read?

I’d start with Ulysses, all the way through. I think that would keep me busy for at least a week. I am now into Chapter Four…after which I always seem to get stuck, or distracted by laundry. But this time I am determined.

The book I am most embarrassed to say I’ve never read is…see above.

I am embarrassed to admit that I have read the first Twilight book.

My then tweenaged daughter was reading it when it first appeared and I thought I’d better see what all the fuss was about. She described it perfectly as a junk food read, like eating a bag of yummy/greasy/appalling French fries. As promised, it kept me up all night. But I’ve had my fill and I’m all done with sparkly vampires.

To find out more about Julie’s writing life, visit: juliemetz.com

To find out more about Julie’s graphic design services for authors, visit her book cover portfolio at: metzdesign.com

Julie Metz is the author of the memoir Perfection, a New York Times bestseller and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. Her story “Instruction” appeared in the anthology The Moment, edited by Six-Word Memoir creator Larry Smith. The recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Publishers Weekly, Glamour, Redbook, Coastal Living, and the story site mrbellersneighborhood.com.

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Share your comments, responses, and questions for Julie here.

Check out her piece “Understanding How to Frame Your Creative Expertise” to get a flavor of her take.

Published originally in another version on August 16, 2011 by Jeffrey Davis, M.A. in Tracking Wonder, Psychology Today