Workshop Invitation Quotes

I hate to be a nag, but you have got to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarcely read. For ideas to germinate and proliferate there has to be fertile ground to sow them in, and for the ground to be fertile it must be mulched with observation, imagination, and other writing.

All of us believe you belong here,” I’d said to the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls as they sat, many of them looking a little awestruck, in the Gothic old-world dining hall at Oxford, surrounded by university professors and students who’d come out for the day to mentor them. I said something similar anytime we had kids visit the White House—teens we invited from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; children from local schools who showed up to work in the garden; high schoolers who came for our career days and workshops in fashion, music, and poetry; even kids I only got to give a quick but emphatic hug to in a rope line. The message was always the same. You belong. You matter. I think highly of you. An economist from a British university would later put out a study that looked at the test performances of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson students, finding that their overall scores jumped significantly after I’d started connecting with them—the equivalent of moving from a C average to an A. Any credit for improvement really belonged to the girls, their teachers, and the daily work they did together, but it also affirmed the idea that kids will invest more when they feel they’re being invested in. I understood that there was power in showing children my regard.

In 2017, I was invited to lead a mindfulness workshop and guide a live meditation on Mingus Mountain, Arizona, to over 100 men and women at a recovery retreat. On the eve of my workshop, I had the opportunity to join in a men's twelve-step meeting, which took place by the campfire in Prescott National Park Forest, with at least 40 men recovering from childhood grief and trauma. The meeting grounded us in what was a large retreat with many unfamiliar faces. I was the only mixed-race Brit, surrounded by mostly white middle-class American men (baby boomers and Generation X), yet our common bond of validating each other's wounds in recovery utterly transcended any differences of nationality, race and heritage. We shared our pain and hope in a non-shaming environment, listening and allowing every man to have his say without interruption. At the end of the meeting we stood up in a large circle and recited the serenity prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me". After the meeting closed, I felt that I belonged and I was enthusiastic about the retreat, even though I was thousands of miles away from England.

went to her workshop three times a week to paint with Kirsten. She rarely frequented the Lark House dining room, preferring to eat out at local restaurants where the owners knew her, or in her apartment, when her daughter-in-law sent the chauffeur around with one of her favorite dishes. Irina kept only basic necessities in her kitchen: fresh fruit, oatmeal, whole-grain bread, honey. Alma and Seth often invited Irina to their ritual Sunday lunch at Sea Cliff, where the family paid the matriarch homage. To Seth, who had previously used any pretext not to arrive before dessert—for even he was unable to consider not putting in an appearance at all—Irina’s presence made the occasion infinitely more appealing. He was still stubbornly pursuing her, but since he was meeting with little success he also went out with previous girlfriends willing to put up with his fickleness. He was bored with them and did not succeed in making Irina jealous. As his grandmother often said and the family often repeated, why waste ammunition on vultures? It was yet another enigmatic saying often used by the Belascos. To Alma, these family reunions began with a pleasant sense of anticipation at seeing her loved ones, particularly her granddaughter, Pauline (she saw Seth frequently enough), but often ended up being a bore, since every topic of conversation became a pretext for getting angry, not from any lack of affection, but out of the bad habit of arguing over trivialities. Seth always looked for ways to challenge or scandalize his parents; Pauline brought to the table yet another cause she had embraced, which she explained in great detail, from genital mutilation to animal slaughterhouses; Doris took great pains to offer her most exquisite culinary experiments, which were veritable banquets, yet regularly ended up weeping in her room because nobody appreciated them; good old Larry meanwhile performed a constant balancing act to avoid quarrels. The grandmother took advantage of Irina to dissipate tension, because the Belascos always behaved in a civilized fashion in front of strangers, even if it was only a humble employee from

Chapter FEEDING YOUR ATTENTION HOG I was once at a New Age party and wanted to get the attention of some particularly lovely sari-wearing, belly-dancing women who were floating in and out of the various rooms. I had discovered that I could move past some of my fear and make a connection with people through singing. So I pulled out my guitar and started playing a song I had worked particularly hard to polish, Fleetwood Mac’s “A Crystalline Knowledge of You.” I was able to make it through without too many mistakes and was starting to feel the relief that comes from surviving traumatic experiences. Then one of the belly-dancing goddesses called to me from across the room, “You are some kind of attention hog, aren’t you!” As soon as she said it, my life passed before me. The room started to swirl, as a typhoon of shame began to suck me down the toilet of my soul. “Embarrassment” is an inadequate word, when someone pins the tail on the jackass of what seems to be your most central core defect. I am usually scrupulous about checking with people when I make requests for attention. But this time I was caught with my hand in the cookie jar up to the elbow. I remember slinking away in silent humiliation, putting my guitar back in its case and making a beeline for my car. I just wanted to get back to my lair to lick my wounds, and try to hold my self-hate demons at bay with a little help from my friend Jack Daniels. After that incident I quit playing music in public at all. Several years later I was attending a very intense, emotional workshop with Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. Our group of about twenty people had been baring and healing our souls for several days. The atmosphere of trust, safety and connectedness had dissolved my defenses and left me with a innocent, childlike need to contribute. And then the words popped out of my mouth, “I’d like to share a song with you all.” These words were followed by the thought: “Now I’ve gone and done it. When everyone turns on me and confirms that I have an incurable narcissistic personality disorder, it will be fifty years before I sing in public again.” Dr. Rosenberg responded in a cheerful, inviting voice. “Sure, go get your guitar!” he said, as though he were unaware that I was about to commit hara-kiri. The others in the group nodded agreement. I ran to my car to get my guitar, which I kept well hidden in the trunk. I was also hoping that I would not just jump in my car and leave. I brought the guitar in, sat down, and played my song. Sweating and relieved that I made it through the song, my first public performance in years, I felt relief as I packed my guitar in its case. Then Dr. Rosenberg said, “And now I would like to hear from each group member how they felt about Kelly playing his song.” “Oh my God!” my inner jackals began to howl, “It was a setup! They made me expose my most vulnerable part and now they are going to crucify me, or maybe just take me out to the rock quarry for a well-deserved stoning!

Three years after I got my law degree, in the summer of 1989, I was a first-year law teacher invited to attend the first-ever workshop on something called “critical race theory,” to be held at the St. Benedict Center in Madison, Wisconsin. At that workshop, I discovered what had been missing for me as a student. I met some of the people who, by then, had begun to be recognized across the nation as major intellectual figures: Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Patricia Williams. And I discovered a community of scholars who were inventing a language and creating a literature that was unlike anything I had read for class in three years of law school. As we enter the twenty-first century, critical race theory is no longer new, but it continues to grow and thrive.

Trigger warning: The phrases that follow may cause heartburn, hives, hot flashes, or fainting spells. “Man up!” “Act like a man!” Is there anything deemed more hateful on college campuses in America today than telling someone to “man up”? In the fall, University of San Diego held a seminar titled “Man Up? Masculinity and Pop Culture.” It was sponsored by the campus’s “Women’s Center.” It was described thusly: “This workshop invites men to engage in a cultural analysis of how masculinity is represented, and how that representation frequently has negative repercussions on men’s lives.”10 College-aged men in America were once taught how to tune up a car, skin a deer, and how to pin a flower on the strap of a date’s dress without sticking her. Today, they are taught to “engage in a cultural analysis of how masculinity is represented.” Good grief.

Because dominant racial narratives encourage whites to approach antiracism in heroic rather than everyday terms, white antiracist teachers need to work at not thinking of ourselves as heroes and not wanting others to view us as exceptional. We must create a context for collective, collegial responses to racism, rather than setting ourselves up as judges who stand apart from other whites. The systematic work of inviting guest speakers, setting up workshops or study groups, attending conferences, arranging to collaborate on racial issues with a sister institution, hiring new faculty, working with parents and leaders in communities of color, and enlisting the support of administrators all helps create such a context. So does talking with colleagues outside of faculty meetings, learning about one another’s teaching, and engaging in the extended conversations that are not possible in faculty meetings.

I was once hired by an organization to deliver a workshop on networking. The goal was to provide their engineers with tools and strategies for expanding their circles of influence—to foster innovation, collaboration, and teambuilding. One of the engineers raised her hand in the middle of the program and bluntly said, “I’m happy with the people in my life and don’t care to add any more.” I respect and appreciate her position and have sometimes felt the same way. But, as long as we are alive, we will meet, greet, and interact with new people. Even if we are not inviting them into our personal lives, being socially brave will open new doors which may have remained closed otherwise.

Day 6 A HAPPY HEART IS GOOD MEDICINE, AND A CHEERFUL MIND WORKS HEALING. You may think you need to experience healing first in order to gain a cheerful heart and mind. However, you have a powerful source of happiness within you: the Holy Spirit! He can empower you to live above your circumstances. When your heart is heavy, ask Him to fill it with buoyant cheerfulness. He takes pleasure in doing this as you entrust yourself into His capable care. Your heart and mind are intricately connected. It is impossible to have a happy heart when your mind is full of negative thoughts. Left to itself, your mind can become “the devil’s workshop”—pulling you away from Me. This is why you need to exert control over your thinking. Ask the Holy Spirit to help you; invite Him to control your mind. Look at your thoughts in His holy Light, and reject those that are unfitting for a child of the King. I will help you replace lies and partial truths with absolute truth. As I refresh your mind with promises of My constant Love and the eternal home awaiting you, heavenly Light shines powerfully into your heart. Bask in this cheery Light, while My healing Presence permeates you deeply—all the way down to your bones! A happy heart is good medicine and a cheerful mind works healing, but a broken spirit dries up the bones. Proverbs 17:22 AMP “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” John 14:16 NKJV The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace. Romans 8:6 “In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2 NKJV —from Jesus Lives

The truth is that some days I feel I am ready for freedom and other days I am so tired I don’t want the responsibility it brings into my life. I want a rest from choosing, from trying to increase my ability to choose wisely. And then, in a moment of grace, I am given a certainty: if I never did one more meditation, ceremony, workshop, therapy session, course, or cleansing diet, never attended one more meeting or participated in one more community cause, never wrote another line... it would be okay. It would truly be okay. For a moment, as I fully feel this revelation, I am free to move toward what I love.

Regardless of how your designs were created, InVision and Marvel allow you to easily turn them into functional prototype websites. With InVision, you upload your page designs, and then link them together to make the website navigable. Then, you can carry out user tests on what, to the users, appears to be a real website, even though it hasn’t seen a smidgen of code. InVision also allows other people to give written feedback on your work-in-progress designs. You upload your designs, and then invite others to annotate them with whatever type of feedback you desire. Notable has similar functionality. Alternatives include Firefly and BugHerd. The Composite app connects to Photoshop files, turning them into clickable prototypes. To gather feedback on your work-in-progress videos, you can use Frame.io, a fantastic web-based platform. Alternatives include Wipster, Symu, Vidhub, and Kollaborate. Such services provide great benefits; it’s hard to gather and record such feedback even when everyone’s in the same room. Optimal Workshop provides several tools (OptimalSort, Treejack, and Chalkmark) to help you optimize your website’s navigation and information architecture. The tools are described in our article about card sorting. Alternatives for card sorting include SimpleCardSort, UsabiliTEST, and Xsort.

I regularly hear statements like, “I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea—I’m married to a wonderful man—but I never know what he is feeling.” One such dissatisfied woman brought her spouse to a workshop, during which she told him, “I feel like I’m married to a wall.” The husband then did an excellent imitation of a wall: he sat mute and immobile. Exasperated, she turned to me and exclaimed, “See! This is what happens all the time. He sits and says nothing. It’s just like living with a wall.” “It sounds to me like you are feeling lonely and wanting more emotional contact with your husband,” I responded. When she agreed, I tried to show how statements such as “I feel like I’m living with a wall” are unlikely to bring her feelings and desires to her husband’s attention. In fact, they are more likely to be heard as criticism than as invitations to connect with our feelings. Furthermore, such statements often lead to self-fulfilling prophecies. A husband, for example, hears himself criticized for behaving like a wall; he is hurt and discouraged and doesn’t respond, thereby confirming his wife’s image of him as a wall.

July 18 Velcro Relationships All minds are joined. — A Course In Miracles While Carla was teaching a seminar, a woman told her, “I feel that my marriage is over. My husband and I have been together for a long time, and we have grown in different directions. I want to leave, but I cannot because I know it would crush him.” A month later at another workshop, a man confessed, “My marriage is empty, but I’m staying with my wife because I know she would never survive a divorce.” Then Carla discovered that he was the husband of the woman who spoke at the first seminar. Relationships are based on matching energy. Like strips of Velcro fasteners, partners contain hooking energies that conform by agreement. Often couples have similar or polarized underlying feelings that go unspoken. When you speak your truth, you invite your partner to do the same, and together you bring the

Scientists debate each other’s findings in the halls of science—universities, laboratories, government agencies, conferences, and workshops. They do not normally organize petitions, particularly public ones whose signatories may or may not circulated information soliciting signatures on a petition “refuting” global warming.14 He did this in concert with a chemist named Arthur Robinson, who composed a lengthy piece challenging mainstream climate science, formatted to look like a reprint from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The “article”—never published in a scientific journal, but summarized in the Wall Street Journal—repeated a wide range of debunked claims, including the assertion that there was no warming at all.15 It was mailed to thousands of American scientists, with a cover letter signed by Seitz inviting the recipients to sign a petition against the Kyoto Protocol.16 Seitz’s letter emphasized his connection with the National Academy of Sciences, giving the impression that the whole thing—the letter, the article, and the petition—was sanctioned by the Academy. Between his mail-in card and a Web site, he gained about fifteen thousand signatures, although since there was no verification process there was no way to determine if these signatures were real, or if real, whether they were actually from scientists.17 In a highly unusual move, the National Academy held a press conference to disclaim the mailing and distance itself from its former president.18 Still, many media outlets reported on the petition as if it were evidence of genuine disagreement in the scientific community, reinforced, perhaps, by Fred Singer’s celebration of it in the Washington Times the very same day the Academy rejected it.19 The “Petition Project” continues today. Fred Seitz is dead, but his letter is alive and well on the Internet, and the project’s Web site claims that its signatories have reached thirty thousand.20

Can I visit the puppet maker’s workshop too?” Andy quickly added with embarrassment, “Young, you can’t impose an invitation on our acquaintance, whom we just met!

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