Archive: Mar 2009

Our very own Shira Tarrant (curator of “The Man Files” here at GWP) is on the advisory committee for this one, as is Michael Kimmel, whose work I utterly admire.  So I totally wanted to share:

Call for Presentations
THE 1st NATIONAL CONFERENCE FOR
CAMPUS-BASED MEN’S GENDER EQUALITY & ANTI-VIOLENCE GROUPS
November 6-7, 2009 / St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota

What it is: Across the country, groups of male students are making their voices heard!  More and more men are finding the courage to say “no” to ideas of manhood and relations between the sexes that aren’t good for women and aren’t good for men as well.  They’re speaking out against date rape and violence against women.  They support gender equality.  Some work through residence life or student activities offices, others through women’s centers and counseling programs.  Some are campus branches of national organizations like MVP, White Ribbon, Men Can Stop Rape, 1 in 4, or V-Men.    These men face common problems: How to have an impact?  How to find positive ways to get their message to other campus men?  How to deal with backlash, to work in partnership with women’s groups, to recruit and sustain their groups?  For the first time, campus-based pro-feminist men’s groups from across the country are meeting together.  To share resources., trade their best ideas, discuss strategies, and simply find out what’s happening on other campuses.

For more details, including on costs and the members of the organizing & advisory committees, visit: www.michaelkaufman.com/campusmensconference

Happy Women’s History Month from Science Grrl! But for this post, you can call me Engineering Grrl, even though the only thing I’ve ever engineered is how to make all the pieces of an IKEA furniture piece fit where they need to fit.

Why am I Engineering Grrl this month? Because I’m participating in the fifth annual Global Marathon For, By and About Women in Engineering! It’s a live webcast and teleconference that ran continuously from noon on Wednesday, March 11 through Noon Thursday, March 12, 2009.

Archives from the 2008 Marathon feature presentations originating from points worldwide, with North America leading off, followed by South America, China, India, South Africa, and Europe. Topics included tips on heightening awareness of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics issues among pre-college, college, and young career women, and examining issues such as retaining women in college engineering programs and the workplace.

The schedule demonstrates how engineering for and about women can be discussed around the world in 24 hours. Doesn’t that just blow your mind? I was excited about what would be discussed from the perspective of Africa. I’ve known plenty of women engineering students who hoped to take their engineering skills to Africa to work toward alleviating suffering from drought by crafting new irrigation systems or bioengineering drought-proof seeds.

I’ve found that many women engineering students think this way– They wonder how they can help the world with their engineering skills. Yes, they “ooh and ah” at rockets but most of the women I’ve met who study engineering are thinking with both their brains and hearts. Of course, it’s not just women: Engineers without Borders, which involves both male and female engineers, is one of the fastest growing student groups on college campuses. National Engineers Week Foundation makes a point to have a “humanitarian” group listing.

When people ask me how I try to convince girls to take an interest in engineering, I reply that I don’t. I ask them what their interests already are and then point out the science, technology, engineering and math could encompass those interests. Does she want to have her own cosmetic line? Well I point out that she should have a solid chemistry background (you don’t want her to turn out like Frenchie from Grease!) and perhaps even a bioengineering background to help smooth out wrinkles, keep mascara from running and make bronzers natural, but also glittery.

There’s not much in this world that hasn’t been handled by an engineer. We just need to see it and help our girls see it too.

Intergenerational convo–my fave subject, as you know!–currently going on over at RH Reality Check:

The Feminist Blame Game

Lighting Our Own Torches

And for more, join me on Weds at the 92Y Tribeca of course 🙂

(Thanks to Gloria Feldt for the heads up…)

There’s a reason I’ve been a little quiet around here this week (and have been sitting on a few posts by others that are ready to go): My beloved 13-year-old cat, Amelia Bedelia, saluted by Marco and famous on Open Salon, was put to rest last night.  We will miss her very much.

Some words of wisdom, from a very wise cousin of mine, who also loved and took care of this wonderful little cat:

When they stop eating it is their sign that they want to move on and we must listen to them. Most cats only ever know of one care taker in their life who knows of all their little funny habits and warmth. Amelia, however, managed to be taken care of and loved by so many different people, and each learned to understand what a special cat she was. News of her passing will even go to Japan, to friends who took care of her for three months one summer and continue to ask about her all the time. Truly a unique little creature.  A friend once told me that when you die, all those cats you took care of in your life will come to meet you and escort you into the next world.  I imagine the same is true among the cats themselves and Sammy is already there preparing to welcome his sister. I can imagine that they will once again be up to the antics they were always up to in life, with Sammy chasing Amelia behind some furniture and then Amelia reaching out with that long grey paw from behind her cover to tap Sammy’s nose. And then Sammy will insist on cleaning Amelia’s head, to which Amelia will respond with a few licks of his head as well. Amelia had a good life. Always with a warm lap to snuggle up on and a loving hand to feed her. l imagine that she move on then, content, purring and happy.

Be at peace, Melie, be at peace.    זיכרונה לברכה

My latest post at Recessionwire.com is a preview, of sorts, of the WGLs’ 92nd Street Y event this coming Wednesday.  It’s now live, here: Learning from the Ladies.

This just in from my friends over at the WMC: Obama To Create White House Women’s Council!

Turns out White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett will be chairing a White House Council on Women and Girls, created by Obama TODAY. Tina Tchen, director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, will serve as executive director of the group. Read all about it here.

HAPPY WOMEN’S HISTORY MONTH! AND HERE’S TO MAKING MORE! (Women’s history, that is.)

According to Kimberly Palmer in this week’s US News & World Report, research from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that once you control for divorce and the proportion of young marriages, then an increase in the unemployment rate increases fertility, suggesting that recessions can lead to mini-baby booms. Hmm…

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up)

Man, Twitter has taking some serious hits in the media this week. First Barbara Walters tries to explain Twitter to her cohosts and provokes an explosion of eye rolling and insults, then Jon Stewart mocks not just the Twitter posts themselves but shakes his fist at those who dare to tweet.

Go ahead, joke it up, I’ll just say this: We mock that which we do not understand, friends. And also this: I think Twitter is brilliant—especially for anyone who wants to be published.

One of the biggest worries I hear from aspiring authors is that they don’t have contacts in the publishing industry. Sure, I understand that, it definitely helps to be at least on a name-recognition basis with someone before asking her to take you and your blood, sweat, and tears seriously.

That’s the part where Twitter comes in: In less than 10 minutes, you can connect directly with agents and editors, authors and publicists, all in a socially egalitarian and non-hierarchical kind of way. You can read their comments on the industry and their jobs, and you can comment right back, no sweat, no formality. (My mom recently exchanged tweets with Rachel Maddow, how cool is that?) It won’t be long before you’re on each other’s radar, your name on their computer screens and theirs on yours. It’s not intimacy, or friendship even, but there’s no denying it — you’re in contact.

Twitter is more immediate than Facebook, but with less of a need to encounter irrelevance and overshare, especially if you’re using it as a professional conversation starter. Not only are you in contact with others who have like-minded interests, but you can learn about your contacts’ lives in a way that will personalize them to you to your advantage. Consider: You’ve just finished your book proposal and are ready to query literary agents when you see that Lucy Agent, whom you’ve been following on Twitter, has posted a comment about a client of hers who just won a prestigious book award. Now, instead of querying her with a standard query form letter, you can write something far more personal, and more likely to get her attention: “Dear Lucy Agent, Congratulations on your client winning the Prestigious Book Award! Entirely deserved—I found the book both beautifully written and insightful. I have a book on a similar topic I’d love for you to consider representing … ” You’ll show that you’ve done your due diligence in learning what’s important to her as a professional, which is bound to earn you some take-me-seriously credit in return.

You can also read tweets (posts, to the uninitiated) from a range of agents about what they love and hate about queries from other writers, so you’ll know what mistakes not to make yourself. Here’s a snippet from agent Colleen Lindsay (@Colleen_Lindsay), who’s worth joining Twitter for alone:

Query #1: 1st paragraph talks only about the multiple themes in the book. There is no second paragraph. Reject.

Query #2: Great query, but book is too similar to something I already represent. Personalized rejection, ask to see other work.

Query #3: YA fantasy, 175,000 words. Reject with educational note about word counts.

Query #4: Loves me. Loves my blog. Has MFA. Won contest I’ve never heard of. Three paragraphs in and it’s still not a query letter. Reject.

You can follow book publishers (@ChronicleBooks has the best book giveaways), book editors (follow me! I’m @lauramazer) and anyone else who tweets about subjects that interest you, from indie crafts to your local elected officials. (On my faves list: @threadless, @iphonenovice, @freakonomics). There’s a long list of pub industry Twitterers, and you can follow as many as them as you like.

And if you’re worried that using Twitter is confusing, well, yeah, OK, it actually really is — for about five minutes, and then it all becomes clear. I’ll remind you that my mother Twitters (@thelmasan, follow her, she’s a rock star! And I bet @maddow thinks so too). Here, I’ll shame you into it: If you can write a book, surely you can figure out a social network that 50 million Elvis fans have already mastered.

I’ll be looking for your tweets, peeps.

…what of the youth shaped by what some are already calling the Great Recession? Will a publication looking back from 2030 damn them with such faint praise? Will they marry younger, be satisfied with stable but less exciting jobs? Will their children mock them for reusing tea bags and counting pennies as if this paycheck were the last? At the very least, they will reckon with tremendous instability, just as their Depression forebears did.

This is an excerpt from a piece by Kate Zernike in Sunday’s Week in Review (always my favorite section!) about how these economic times will shape the generation just coming of age. In short, there were plenty of comparisons made to the tight-lipped, nose-to-the-grindstone depression-era babies—the grandparents who reuse tea bags and never buy lottery tickets. The author and her experts wondered, will the kids of today become stingy, safe, and square tomorrow?

I’m skeptical. As I research my new book, a collection of ten profiles of people under 35 doing interesting social change work, I’m coming across a very different trend. Tough economic times seems to have made young people creative and very practical—a stunning and hopeful combination. It’s not that they aren’t feeling the burn. It’s harder than it has been in decades to start a non-profit and get funding, for example. But here’s the thing: today’s youngest and most cutting edge thinkers aren’t really starting non-profits or trending towards traditional methods of making the world more just. They’re creating hybrid media companies, public-private ventures, drinking clubs, and secret societies. They’re rejecting charity models and trying to figure out how to get folks to align their own self-interests with altruistic causes. They’re thinking locally and globally simultaneously.

They’re not taking huge financial risks—either personally or with the funding they bring in, but that’s not keeping their philosophies or experiments “safe,” as the NYT predicts. It’s just motivating them to be incredibly creative, really resourceful, and organic in their interventions. What a silver lining, heh?

Apply now!