blogging life

Ok Penners, we’re excited to try this newfangled technology out tonight! At 7pm ET tonight, we’ll have a MOGULUS video feed running the live panel of national leaders and feminists discussing what happened on yesterday, Election Day, and where we go from here. The panelists will be in Cambridge, we’ll be here online, chatting it up with each other in the comments section of the post, and posing our own questions to the panel. A few last-minute details:

1. As we watch, we’ll be chatting it up over here in the comments section. But we just learned, if you want to ask questions of folks at the live event, use the MOGULUS CHAT FUNCTION, not our comments thread, because the event has grown and the organizers of the panel (The Center for New Words ladies) can’t monitor all the comments threads. They’ll be monitoring the mogulus chat thread ONLY. Also, if folks are on the mogulus chat thread you can also chat with other readers on all the other blogs – everyone who’s watching the feed.

2. For Bostonians planning to attend the offline panel: The new venue is LESLEY UNIVERSITY AMPITHEATER, 1815 Mass. Ave in Cambridge.

See you online over here in a few hours!

Well, it’s been a long election season, and in just 5 days it will be time to come together to figure out what it all means and what’s next. GWP is PSYCHED to be participating in next Wednesday’s Feminist Town Forum, organized by our friends at The Center for New Words. Here’s the dish:

At this culmination of the This Is What Women Want election project, please join those of us here at GWP, a panel of national leaders, and the feminist community nationwide to discuss what happened on Election Day, and what we should be thinking about and doing now to fight for equality and justice for all.

This is a first of its kind event convening feminists from around the country live via the blogosphere! Pretty cool, no? You’ll be able to watch live, converse with other audience members around the country, and submit your comments and questions in real time.

Please feel free to start telling us what issues and ideas YOU’D like to hear the panel address.  The organizers will get these comments to the panelists in advance, so this is your way to help influence the conversation.

(Facebook users: Click here to RSVP and invite your friends!)

Yup, it’s in the works! We’ve been scanning the universe of feminist calendars and have yet to find one that lists public talks, panels, and readings on feminist topics in selected cities. So, at the wise suggestion of one of our editors, we thought we’d start one of our own!

GWP’s Feminism in Public (Public Feminism?) calendar will eventually be available here. In the meantime, if you know of other useful calendars that we should link to on our Public Events page, please share them in comments. We welcome your suggestions.

And by the way, while I was tempted to post this picture to signify “feminist calendar”

you’ll see that I didn’t. Except — whoops — I kind of just did.

Now this is just the kind of blog action/activism that makes our hearts sing over here.

Join bloggers around the country and around the world tomorrow to blog in support of marriage equality for same-sex couples and against California’s Proposition 8! It’s Write to Marry Day.

The event will give bloggers a chance to voice their opposition to Prop 8 and highlight what they may have already done, online or off, to stop the measure. The campaign will also educate California voters of the need to “go all the way” down the ballot to vote on the proposition.

We’ve got some posts of our own in store, but if any GWP readers are interested in sharing their ink with us tomorrow, please feel free to submit your wares!

Thanks to our own Gwen B for the heads up, and to Mombian for organizing.

Sometimes things come through my Inbox that are just too good not to share.  This here’s a resource–a newsletter–for those of you who, like me, are feeling baffled by the economic crisis, hungry for explanations in non-super-specialized language, and in need of a savvy woman’s perspective on the whole thing.  It’s from Jacki Zehner, author of the blog PursePundit, and a dear dear friend.  Writes Jacki:

As a retired partner of Goldman Sachs and now a partner of Circle Wealth Management Group, I spend a lot of time thinking about the financial markets and the world in general. I feel so privileged to have access to some of the smartest people on the planet, and for me, life is about sharing and about community. I am deeply committed to writing about what I consider important issues and topics related to money, markets and changing the world.  I started a blog at the beginning of the year because I wanted to create a platform to share knowledge and information as I thought it would be a historical one in the financial markets. Little did I know it would be that and more.

Next to come will be some newsletters that will contain resources on a variety of different topics with the main subject areas being money, investing, philanthropy and social change. That will come to your Inbox if you subscribe. My dream is it becomes a DAILY CANDY type newsletter–not around where to get the latest deals of cashmere sweaters, but rather on subjects that keep us informed and empowered.

Please take a minute to add you email to the subscriber icon on my blog and pass it on to your friends. For me, at this moment, it is what I can do to try to be the change I want to see in the world.  What I can do is take a minimum 30 minutes a day to put something out there in the world that I think is relevant based on what I have read or who I talk to. I believe in the power of women working together to make the world a better place.

So we’re just discovering some of these here at the new GWP. For those not yet in the know, a blog carnival is where someone takes the time to find really good blog posts on a given topic, and then puts all those posts together in a blog post called a “carnival”. Here are some of our faves:

carnival of feminists
feminist carnival of sexual freedom and autonomy
scientiae carnival
carnival against sexual violence
carnival of the liberals

Know of other good ones? Please share in comments!

Girl with Pen, a group blog that bridges academic and popular feminist spheres (YEP, THAT’S US!), is seeking an intern to help with outreach. Founded by author and Woodhull Fellow Deborah Siegel , Girl with Pen is at an exciting moment as it transitions to a group blog comprising diverse voices of all stripes: psychologists, sociologists, women’s studies scholars, book editors, historians, and well-known feminist bloggers. Girl with Pen is seeking to expand its presence in the web through Web 2.0 social networking tools and listserv use, and we need someone to help us do this. We are seeking someone who is a self-starter, tech-savvy, and interested in getting involved in the feminist blogosphere. While we cannot offer to pay at this point, working at Girl with Pen will allow you to network, network, network. The internship, which involves 5 hours/week of work and weekly call-ins with the GWP team, will take place over a 3 to 4 month period.

And thanks for spreading word!

Now that the group GWP is fully launched, we are finally getting around to some blog maintenance items that have long been on the to-do list. Like, ahem, expanding our blogroll. Our blogroll is on the left, scroll down. Are there sites that should be there but aren’t? And blogrolls that we should be on but aren’t? Your suggestions are most welcome! Please post em in comments and we’ll take it from there.

Thanks so much for your help!

Nope, I’m not talkin about John McSarah Palin-cain. I’m talkin about the new team assembled here at GWP! And what a bunch, heh?

I’ll still be blogging pretty much daily.  Kristen Loveland will join me weekly, and our contributors will be bringing you monthly fare. Click on the names over there (->) to learn more about everyone’s background, and all our hot new column topics as well.

In addition to new regular voices, we’ve got a new look. Goodbye Blogspot, hello WordPress.

So welcome to the new site, sit back, take a good look around, enjoy the read, and get your pen on. We’ll be posting posts with your comments in them–under the title “Your Ink”–coming soon!

P.S. The GWP e-blast goes out this morning. If you haven’t received it and you’d like to, please be sure to sign up in the box up on the right.

And on the heels of Kristen’s awesome Palin/Morgan/generational commentary this morning, here’s one from my fellow graduate of Progressive Women’s Voices program, Avis A. Jones-DeWeever:

Where Have Our Standards Gone?

Sarah Palin survived the debate, but her down-home message can do little to reassure voters who have every reason to demand a change of direction.

What does it say about a nation, when the true take away message from a vice-presidential debate is that one of its participants actually does have the ability to string together a series of coherent sentences? Talk about the poverty of low-expectations. Sure, Sarah Palin made it through last night without adding to her long list of cringe inducing moments. But for a nation facing its greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, two sustained wars, and the lingering concern of the whereabouts and activities of Osama Bin Laden, being folksy just isn’t good enough. Competence matters. And clearly, Palin falls short.

Over and over, Governor Palin evaded questions, returned to the well-worn “Maverick” crutch, and sang the same ole’ Republican tune about the evils of government. But it’s hard to sell the tired anti-government spiel when your running mate pseudo-suspends his campaign to make sure that very government comes to the rescue of interconnected economies here and abroad.

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