Crystallizing

The Future Is Like Pie #4

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
June 04, 2018

May was a swarm: warm, busy, and thoroughly soaked in professional stress.

Meaning: I was so worried about giving my talk at Confab (the content strategy conference) that I barely remember the month of May. My stress carried with it a joy-obliterating laser focus. The talk was new and untested, drawn from the notes of the book I’m (still) working on; putting the slides together meant crystallizing thoughts I hadn’t yet been forced to crystallize. Of course I became precious about it. 

But (“surprise!” said my therapist), the talk went well. My delivery was strong, and I heard many excited, positive responses in person and on Twitter. And, of course, it helped that the conference itself was completely wonderful.

I spoke about the value of structure (site structure, page structure, and content structure) in building inclusive experiences on the web. I’ll be writing up a post that covers the material soon, but in the meantime: 

In spite of my anxiety—and I mean that, let’s be so spiteful of anxiety—I can’t thank the Confab event team and community enough for the opportunity to give this talk. It was an absolutely thrilling experience.

And now, two-and-a-half other things to read:

My friend Alex McElroy published this absolutely heart-wrenching and stellar long-read, “Hazardous Cravings,” about eating disorders, toxic masculinity, and teenage boyhood. Telling lines:

“Perhaps we weren’t, as I’d liked to believe, enacting some vulnerable version of masculinity but applying its worst expectations—sacrificing our bodies, refusing to care for ourselves—to a traditionally feminine project: becoming thinner. Because as open as we were with each other, we nevertheless refused to acknowledge the damage we caused to ourselves. We couldn’t. We lacked the language to see our sickness as sickness. He could not be “anorexic,” just as I could not be “bulimic.” For men, those words were locked houses.”

Talia Lavin’s article “When Men Tell the #MeToo Story, They’re Always the Victims” is now a month old, which is extraordinarily ancient in internet time, but this piece deserves to be read now and forever. I was struck by this quote when it first came out:

“These are not stories of individual brokenness. They are stories of institutionalized depravity. They are, functionally, narratives of just how much effort and cruelty it takes to keep powerful white men in the spotlight, and to leave everyone else to rot in the dark.”

Finally, I want to share my new poetry Patreon. As I wrote over there recently, I’ve created it for three reasons:

  1. Because I keep writing about writing (like right now, for instance), and I was looking for a more dedicated outlet for that kind of thinking;

  2. Because establishing a public space to talk about my poetry will create accountability (as in, I need to treat it as a professional endeavor, instead of hiding and downplaying my efforts);

  3. Because I want to draw attention to the capitalist mechanisms behind the production and consumption of poetry, and the messed up ways that society assigns value to it. Perhaps a more positive way of putting that is to say that I’m trying to support other poets; what I’m getting from patrons is going right back into other Patreon creators.

The feed there is starting to shape up like a letter similar to this one, but with a specific focus on poetry—mine and other’s. I’ve got a letter ready to go out tomorrow, so if you’re interested, join now! (And if you do: holy smokes, thank you so much.)

Happy Pride Month! If you’re looking for a way to support our trans friends and family, might I recommend Trans Lifeline? They’re a 501(c)3 non-profit that operates a crisis hotline for transgender people, run by transgender people. Our support can save lives.

❤️