Creative Process – Page 4

15 Reasons Why Teachers Make Great Content Marketers

There are a lot of reasons why those trained as teachers make highly effective content marketers. Here is a list 15 reasons with short explanations.

Teachers have to differentiate instruction in the classroom, so know how to differentiate content to produce for different audiences.

Any teacher worth their salt will tell you that it’s through approaching the same material in a variety of ways that allows for the greatest learning gains for their students. Visual aids, kinesthetic manipulation of symbolic objects and auditory engagement all should be used to obtain the highest possible learning gains. Great content marketers are able to determine how visual engagement through artifacts such as infographics, videos and graphics can synergistically be combined with text and audio to convey information pertinent to their buyers journey.

Buyer Personas Blog

Teachers have to repackage and repurpose materials for their lesson plans, so they know how to reuse content.

Teachers are faced with an ever-changing audience, and one lesson that might do great for a particular group of students may not be so effective for another. Recognizing the same is true for their publications, great content marketers will create material for a variety of different marketing personas.

Teachers have to track student progress over time, so they know how to quantify progress for marketing,

Before students learn new material they use pre-assessment strategies in order to determine the depth to which certain material is already understood. Once they have determined a baseline, they are able to build upon that knowledge – a process known as scaffolding. Great content marketers recognize that not everyone is not at the same point on the buyers journey and is thus able to create a number of sign posts to help them get to their destination.

Teachers have to document their daily and weekly lesson plans, so they know how to prepare work reports.

Managing a classroom is but one side of the coin of teaching. The other, lesson planning and record keeping often takes up nearly as much time as that spent with students. Through the latter component, teachers are able to document gains. Great content marketers do the same to share this information with clients.

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Teachers have to prepare multiple week lesson plans on various units of inquiry, so they know how to organize and enact a publishing schedule.

A good teacher knows that they can’t possibly achieve the most out of their classroom time unless every minute is accounted for with corresponding activity. Many teachers use formulas on the daily level – such as beginning of the class reviews the previous lesson plan, explanation of key words and concepts to be addressed that day, learning activities and end of class reflection – as well as on the unit level – such as pre-assessment strategies, lessons plans and formative tests. Great content marketers are able to create material that is valuable unto itself and that can also be an element of keystone content – longer form content that lowers PPC costs and helps to establish a business as a thought leader in the industry.

Teachers have to give precise instructions to students lest uncertainty cause problems, so they know how to work well with other marketing staff.

Having to explain unclear directions or a test questions is both embarrassing and a waste of classroom time. Good teachers recognize how imprecise language can lead to confusion and consistently seek to avoid such situations from arising. Good marketers always keep their messages clear so that similar loss of productivity within a collaborative work environment doesn’t occur.

Teachers have to come up with interesting ways to present their material lest students lose interest, so they know how to make compelling marketing content.

Having differentiated methods of teaching is certainly important, but without the initial student buy in teachers are fighting an uphill battle. Whether it is through a displaying an image that fascinates student’s attention or asking a provocative question, it is often the first few moments that determines whether classroom participation will be active or passive. Great content marketers know not only how to present information in a variety of manner but how to immediately gain the interests of various marketing personas and to hold it.

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Teachers have to stay abreast of current best practices, so are used to viewing work as a career requiring continuing education.

In order to maintain their status as certified teaching credentials, teachers must attend in-service training or take college level classes in order to stay abreast of the latest research-based best practices for teaching. Great content marketers must do the same sort of research in their field as changes in the manner in which search engines operate have and will continue to cause content markets to adjust their strategies and tactics.

Teachers are savvy cultural consumers and disseminators, so they can apply this in creative endeavors to help build brand value.

Once brand awareness has been established, brand association is the most important factor that will create brand loyalty to consumers. Images, symbols, attributes and values associated with a brand – their use helps to elicit feelings within the customer beyond the fulfillment of their immediate need for a specific product or service. Teachers apply this knowledge in the creation of the educational guises that change based upon the composition and subject area content of their classes. Great content marketers are aware of this as well and exploit this via their marketing products.

Brand Awareness

Teachers have to apply rubrics in the classroom to determine which methods work and which don’t, so they know how to apply the principles of A/B testing.

Teachers not only test their students, but test their tests in order to determine whether or not certain material they covered was effective at a statistical. If all students miss questions five through nine, for example, certain material was not presented in an appropriate manner and should be covered differently in the future. Great content marketers engage in the same practices in order to determine which aesthetic or message is most compelling.

Teachers in humanities present content that is written at the grade level most Americans read at, so they know how to produce content that is not too complex for their readers.

Teachers that stop lecturing or a classroom discussion to explain a word lose their momentum. While teaching vocabulary is certainly an important component of teaching it must not be an activity that is unnecessarily frequent. Great content marketers write according to their audience’s reading abilities. While the level of content complexity will shift based upon the outlet for the content, they certainly know how to keep things single enough so rapport is established.

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Teachers have to stay professional when parents are dissatisfied with their child’s grades, so they know how to respectfully communicate with and manage the expectations of clients.

It’s commonly recognized among teachers that while parents once blamed their own children for their poor grades, they now seek to place blame on those that give them. Passive or active aggression has lead to many contracts to include clauses that allow teachers to have administration present when dealing with hostile parents. Great teachers, however, are able to defuse such situations in a way that they need not involve others. Over a long enough time frame even the greatest content marketers will too deal with such expressions of concern over failure as unlike with direct marketing, inbound marketing can sometimes take a longer period of time to see returns. Calmly explaining the situation, respectfully addressing any questions no matter how they are worded and reiterating that both parties desire the same things from the relationship can go a long way to maintaining client satisfaction.

Teachers have to follow State and Federal Educational Standards, so can easily abide by the guidelines set by clients, search engines, news outlets and content platforms.

Teachers operate under an incredibly large number of regulations on the methods and goals informing their work. Adherence to them is often the difference between those that stay in the field and those that don’t have their contract renewed. Great content marketers are able to follow the explicit guidelines of their clients as well those set by the outlets that their content is hosted upon.

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Teachers are highly skilled in researching their subject area, so can apply these abilities to others areas for content development.

Teachers in the humanities transmit a variety of subject area content as well as critical thinking and communication skills. They also know how to find the information that they don’t know. Great content marketers do extensive research into the informational and promotional outlets of goods and services before they write their first piece and from this are able to produce better work and can see which content topics aren’t being addressed that could be useful to clients.

Teachers know how to work in groups, so can bring that to a marketing team.

While teachers seek to create the greatest learning gains through their lesson plans, it’s sometimes the brief one-on-one contact that allows for students to obtain those “A-ha!” moments that will stick with them for the rest of their life. Great content marketers working together on a project don’t seek to compete with one another for recognition but to co-operate with one another on behalf of their client.

If you are interested in learning about how the content marketer/teacher who wrote this can help out your business, please contact me!

Unpacking Happy's Chapter

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve loved gangsta movies. I’d set up fake Colombia House accounts in order to get free VHS tapes of films like Menace II Society, Boyz ‘n the Hood, New Jack City, Juice, Paid In Full, and Deep Cover and watch them over and over again.
Whereas Jesse’s chapter is stylized after Spanish picaresque and German Bildungsroman literature, Happy’s is based on these films as well as a number of original documents and documentaries. _{1, 2, 3}

Rather than merely replicate these narratives, however, I wanted to inverse a number of the tropes that are found in these gangster films/reality to depict a gang that is crypto-socialist, truly consensual work relations rather than that which is strictly primitive-capitalist and based on force.
Now presuming that you’re familiar with the above listed movies, so I don’t have to cite each, here are some of those narrative tropes that I mentioned/inverted.
1. The leader of a group got due to his ruthless violence or a chance encounter with a plug rather than his intellect.
2. The leader of the group stays in power based upon loyalty out of fear and not of love (unless relations are also familial).
3. The capture of power foreshadows similar machinations on the part of someone else within the organization that similarly wants to take over.
4. Wealth created from the criminal venture predominantly accumulates in the hands of those at the top.
5. This wealth created goes primarily towards the administrator’s consumption, which leads to organizational degeneration in some fashion.
6. Money spent is primarily upon luxury goods that are flaunted.
7. This leads to general envy/viewing the criminal enterprise as the best provider for income and entices those willing to do whatever to get it, but this makes community relations poor.
Making an analogy to larger institutions of political economy, as I would like my readers to so, I can say in short hand that the typically depicted criminal association is more akin to an absolute monarchy.
This passage shows Happy’s organization is significantly different and touches upon a number of the problems that will be delved into later in the chapter. Specifically what is the Project; the impact that the investigation into Officer Daniels illegal dealings; who the other person is that Happy is getting information from in the police department; their relationship to the Zoe Pounds; the possibility that some conflict might transpire should a power vacuum be created from several Zoe Pounds members finding themselves arraigned; who are these important people in Atlanta that requires Happy to have to meet them in person, etc.
I’ve still got a lot to write about for this chapter to near completion – but I hope this explanation of a portion of my project and the small section of the chapter convinces you that my serial novel project is worth getting into and you buy Book 1 of Unraveling!

Review of The Artist’s Way

A part of the reason that it took me so long to complete the first part of the serial novel book that I’d first conceived of in 2009 was largely because I had a large number of beliefs about creation and writing, not to mention perspectives in general, that wasn’t healthy for an aesthetically productive life. While going through my journals I’ve been able to see that this knowledge wasn’t always lost on me, but I wasn’t always able to incorporate it into my creative practice and my periods of backsliding far outpaced that of my moving in the right direction. I don’t remember who suggested that I read The Artist’s Way, for the list who I had been complaining about my frustrations was quite large, but thankfully someone did and my mom purchased it for me for my birthday. It laid unread for a few weeks besides my bed, where I would pick it up and peruse the first few pages. I was reluctant to give it a try first out of pride – surely I didn’t really need a book to tell me how to be an artist, I AM an artist – and later out of aversion to what I perceived to be a New Agey philosophizing about the artist as a conduit of God. Once I started it in earnest, however, I immediately realized how much I needed it and how much my own conception of the Divine was actually connected to that which Julia Cameron described.

Since reading the book I feel immeasurably more cognizant of the habits of thought and behavior that prevent me from focusing on my work and the need for me to push through. Sickness is a power, and being frustrated is a way of feeling special – as if something going on in one’s life can take a magical form and prevent someone from creative production! Getting rid of that mindset through a number of steps that she outlines allows you to recover and become more aligned with what your hopes are.

One of the recurring instructions throughout the book is to just keep creating in some form and though it might not be exactly what you expect at that moment it will help you to realize it. Cameron here provides the reader with two main practices; morning pages written in a journal that are at least three pages in length and artist’s dates. The latter one writes upon waking. The idea is to help get all of the gunk out of your head so as to help reorganize your life in a manner that is more aligned with your artistic intentions. The latter is a commitment once a week to engage in some sort of aesthetic consumption that takes you someplace – be it an open mic night, a museum, a gallery, a book reading, etc. Going to these and experiencing other people’s art makes you more receptive to creation as well as provides you with a greater stock of material from which to pull.

At the end of each week the book asks you to track how much you followed these directions and also provides a series of steps to deepen the insight experientially. This can be writing a series of destructive thoughts that play in your mind as well as new affirmations to repeat into the mirror to negate them. Since completing a number of the weekly tasks, I admit to not completing them all, I find myself less likely to make myself feel guilty when I get derailed from my work and I’m clearer about my goals.

One of my main stultifying habits was not normally to value product over process, however I came to realize through one of the reflection writing practices that I came to adopt someone else’s perspective of the role of my art. Previously I’d written only because I enjoyed doing it and had no expectations that anyone other than a few friends would experience.
Another bad habit was to allow myself to get caught in a series of images of myself that made it difficult for me to have a clear self-image. What does this mean? Well, during my first marriage my partner, who was wonderful in many ways, encouraged me to go into a professional career despite my ambivalence towards it. I liked the challenge of being a successful lawyer, but it was never something that appealed to me in a deeper level. I began to research law schools, practice for the LSAT, think that devoting time to my creative work was a waste – though it was what I loved – and on and on.

While I frequently mark up my books, The Artists Way is by far my most annotated text. There are long passages of deep insight into a healthier worldview more productive to creativity. These I’d needed to help counter the false axioms and practices that I’d adopted from a number of the various life situations. One of them that I really like was:

“People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or the specifically imagined.

As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life situation, we become available for the moment. It is there, in the particular, that we contact the creative self. Until we experience the freedom of solitude, we cannot connect authentically. We may be enmeshed, but we are not encountered.

Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific: an origin from which work flows.”

This helped remind me and reorient me in way that I knew, which reminds me of a quote by Henry Miller – and I’m paraphrasing – which states that those beautiful phrases which we fall in love with in certain passages don’t always tell us something new but touches upon those parts of ourselves that we’ve allowed ourselves to forget.

I’m definitely going to be rereading this book again and as The Artist’s Way is a trilogy, Walking in this World: The Practical Art of Creativity and Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance the latter two iterations, I’m definitely going to be reading this as well and hope that I can, as Cameron suggests in the back, find others that have read it as well to create a creative cluster. When I think of my most productive times it has been amongst groups of fiction writers and poets that were also drunk in inspiration to produce creatively.

Review of “Dead Horse”

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My feelings towards poetry in general are, to put it simply, complex. Or maybe it’s not as I can crudely word my view as such: “I once loved poetry and considered myself as a poet but now I do not love it or claim that title.” More specifically, there are a number of poets that I think are quite worthwhile of people’s attention but in general I find myself aligned with Henry Miller’s criticism of modern poetry in The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud:

“Our [modern] poets are jealous of the name but show no disposition to accept the responsibilities of their office. They have not proved themselves poets; they are writing not for a world which hangs on their every word but for one another. They justify their impotence by deliberately making themselves unintelligible. They are locked in their glorified little ego; they hold themselves aloof from the world of fear of being shattered at the first contact. They are not even personal, when one gets right down to it, for if they were we might understand their torment and their delirium, such as it is. They have made themselves as abstract as the problems of the physicist. Theirs is a womblike yearning for a world of pure poetry in which the effort to communicate is reduced to zero.”

That said, I must admit that besides the poems shared in a writing group I was in two years ago that I did find worthwhile, I haven’t read any published poetry over the past several years written by anyone in the past twenty years because of my general ambivalence to it. I recognize that there are likely a number of modern poets quite worthy of public attention, however my awareness of this axiom has not been such that it is strong enough to circumvent my desire to avoid having to go through so much chaff to find a few grains of wheat. As such my literary diet has prioritized fiction and non-fiction.

A recent exception to this course is the collection of poems entitled Dead Horse by Niina Pollari. Given the long introduction to this book review – which normally jumps right in to the matter at hand – I will now place at the beginning what I normally state at the end and write that I think that this book is one of those pieces of wheat, it is one of those worthy publications of poetry. I will also add in the interest of full disclosure before reviewing this collection of poems – as if this medium were an investment program on television and I were a financial analyst offering advice on what to buy to build your stock portfolio (which in a way is was I am now doing) – that Niina is one of the two great loves that I have had in my life and that for a brief but bright period half my lifetime ago she was my creative inspiration and collaborationist. All this said, to the Dead Horse!

One of the aspects of the book that I like is the sly humor throughout the poems. There are a number of witty phrasings and lines that never seem to make a poem seem trite or cheap. For instance there is the poem I Love The Phone. This piece reflects how it is that phone connectivity has become a means for self-evaluating people’s worth to others, how people’s nervous anticipation of the vibrating ring of phones has them almost like Pavlov’s dogs and how the digital trail left by it is more valuable as it is tangible. Rather than spouting a jeremiad against this technological entrainment of the body to the logic of the machine – she closes with:

And when the archaeologists find me they can see all the times
That people called or texted
And they can say to themselves
“She was very beloved”

In a way that is humorous, she is able to point out with this that one day our anxieties about such cyborgization of the self will seem without cause and be the new normal. As someone who has seen in their lifetime long notes expressing interest in a person from being cute and endearing to something indicative of some sort of mental disorder, I can both understand, relate and appreciate what will inevitably be the datedness of our thoughts in a few years.

This is not the only instance of technological apparatuses impinging upon the person in Pollari’s poetry (a phrase I crafted as such simply because I found the sound of it sonorous). At the high end of technical development, Niina references a computer in To The Specialists that is sat in front of for “13, 14 hours a day”. While surfing the web for work, it re-forges her spine her spine such that she must see a laborer referenced in the title. At the low end of technical development, she references a home – a.k.a. the safe for the self – in Self-Love is Important that she has stayed in for a for prolonged period of time and this disconnection from nature leads to the consumption of psycho-stimulants (coffee and wine) that leaves a feeling of self loathing only negated by the intellectual recognition that she mush love herself. Lest I get too lost in following certain themes throughout, let me go back to the place my train of thought left before making the above connections.

There’s humor and connection to each not only within the aforementioned individual poems, but throughout – hence their categorization into Bones, Blood and Money in the table of contents. For instance in Nature Poem she states that “Nature bores me / The way a thing I don’t understand bores me / Like when I looked up an article about plagiarism…” and then in the next poem, To The Bone, she states “Please don’t stare, I don’t feel good / I lifted that line out of a teenager’s blog”. The juxtaposition here has an immediate comic effect. The apparent contradiction is not, however, just humorous but insightful as in the latter alluded to work is the sentiment that though people exist as types their manifestation of them is always novel just as songs lyrics may at times sound trite, their meaning changes based upon the context in which they are said or sung. It’s this understated dark humor and depth of perception that made me enjoy the book so much.

For instance in Personal Pain, Pollari recounts a minor operation and a number of other instances in which she experienced physical pain – be it the piercing of a tattoo needle or that of a safety pin. Having spoken with a number of people in the tattoo and suspension scene I know that her assessment of the original stinging sensation referred to in the poem is as she says in the last stanza:

The pain was not transcendent
As much as I would have liked for it to be
Wanting transcendence through pain is a deep wish I always have
I know I am not alone there

All of the other poems are worth reflecting on in greater detail. I feel like I may be speaking insufficiently about them, however I also want to encourage your to experience them for yourself. If you’d like to read other’s comments about a few more passages, there’s this and also this. Suffice it to say, I’ve read and re-read the collection a few times not and continue to find it engaging. That said – to be honest I must admit there are a few moments when I struggled to understand certain poetic choices – for instance in No Emergency why she chooses to break up of stanzas certain stanzas – as well as the meaning of a few of the images and transitions. I think it’s more likely that I’ve grown accustomed to a certain type of writing style and so sometimes buck the small amount of labor that goes into a deep reading. I’m happy to accept these mysteries now and look forward to solving them later.

You can follow Niina’s work here and read a poem of Niina’s that is not included in Dead Horse here.

Also check out this response to Dead Horse called You’re Not the Only One from Night Redacted by Chelsea Hodson.

And then there is this book-video-preview-i-don’t-know-what-to-call-it-thing:

The real brothers who inspired the Sucrarios in Unraveling

Two of the antagonists in Unraveling are a pair of brothers whose last name is Sucrario. Sucrario is not a “real” Spanish last name or even a real Spanish word but a portmanteau term combining the Spanish word for sugar, “sucre” with the Spanish word for assassin “sicario”. While the characters and their history are fictional, they are largely based upon two real people: Alfonso and Jose “Pepe” Fanjul.

Documentation that the Gomez-Mena’s were the largest sugar owners in Cuba before the revolution

Despite Alonso Fanjul’s claim otherwise, his grandfather Jose Gomez-Mena was intimately involved with the functioning of the Batista government. He was Batista’s Minister of Agriculture, which in a country that had since it’s colonization been recognized as one giant sugar plantation is a big deal. He was also involved in banking and using capital to consolidate sugar holdings and upgrade their productive facilities. He was an important person and his friends and associates included a number of American politicians, important to keeping sugar tariffs low, as well as the former president of Cuba, Mario Menocal. Prior to this post and private sugar and banking enterprises the Gomez-Mena family were involved in the Cuban sugar trade at a time when the slave trade was legal. Even after it was officially abolished, the conditions of the Africans remained largely the same as it was before. To circumvent the ban of chattel slavery over 100,000 Chinese workers were imported. Though the white, landowning Cubans considered “the Celestials” less barbaric than the blacks, their work and living conditions were much the same.

The Fanjul family, which had long ties to Spainish nobility, escaped Cuba following the seizure of governmental authority by the Communist Party of Cuba headed by Fidel Castro. Castro even used one of the mansions built by Jose Gomez-Mena as his private residence and is even said to have met with him to point at a map of his holdings and tell him face to face that all of that land now belonged to the government’s collective farms. The mansion as well as his extensive private art collection remains intact and is now called the Museum of Decorative Arts and can be viewed by the public.

After arriving in the United States with all of the cash, capital goods and deeds that they could carry and ship without getting caught, the Gomez-Mena/Fanjul family were able to obtain a number of large farming subsidies with the help of the numerous American politicians whose favor they had curried over the year and were able to obtain large parcels of land for sugar production, and help halt the flow of Cuban sugar. Raising sugar cane in the Everglades was long a desire for many American farmers. Given the costs of land reclamation, dike projects, and other issues this was considered impossible without significant government assistance. While Florida and the Federal government wouldn’t seriously consider such a project prior to the Cuban Revolution due the huge amount of capital investment and political risk that it talked, after the revolution they did. Those that had cultivated the relationships with the right politicians – like the Fanjul’s had – were able to rapidly build back up their wealth.

According to the Land Report, the Fanjul brothers now collectively own 160,000 acres of land, or 250 square miles, in Florida and according to the New York Times they own 240,000 acres, or 275 square miles, in the Dominican Republic. Based on too many reports to cite here, they are not merely the farmers, land conservationists and philanthropists that they promote themselves as, but are sugar barons in the most original sense of the word. The co-existence of feudal labor relations within a mixed-capitalist economy isn’t itself surprising. What is perhaps more so is the wide reporting of it that doesn’t seem to gather any traction in the public imagination. Articles regularly point out how their meagre investments of, say, two million dollars, into the American political machinery will bring a return of sixty-five million dollars.

The Fanjul brothers are notoriously shy of the public spotlight, one of the reasons that I wanted to fictionalize them, yet still make it into the press occasionally. Most recently they’ve been receiving press over their actions taken to prevent action being taken on Florida’s 2014 Amendment 1, which passed with 78% of the vote. Their goal? Prevent the purchase of land that would be used to increase the quality of South Florida’s water supply. Their money not only buys the political machinery of south Florida but a number of estates in the Domincan Republic, Florida and a lavish lifestyle.

References

International Migration in Cuba: Accumulation, Imperial Designs, and Transnational Social Fields

The Castro Collection

2014 Land Report

Land Report on the Fanjuls

Everglades to be Killed this October

In the Kingdom of Big Sugar

Wikileaks: Fanjuls among ‘sugar barons’ who ‘muscled’ lawmakers to kill free trade deal

Interview with Paul Kwiatkowski

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So after reading (and loving) Paul Kwiatowski’s book And Every Day Was Overcast and then confirming that one of the people that I thought I knew from the pictures in it was in fact who I thought it was, I decided to email Paul Kwiatkowski to request an interview. I wanted to talk to him about growing up in South Florida, his creative process as well as his early literary and musical influences. He agreed to speak with me and on July 23rd we spoke over the phone.

Ariel Sheen

So, have you had any contact with people whose pictures you took in the book and if so what have been some of their responses to it?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah some of the people I’m still in contact with. Most of the people I’ve talked to have dug it. As for those that I haven’t spoken with, well, I hope they like the project and know where I was coming from with it.

Ariel Sheen

Keeping in mind that I love the lyrical nature of the book, I’m wondering what your decision making process was in deciding to forego a traditional narrative arc.

Paul Kwiatkowski

A narrative arc would be disingenuous to the material considering it’s the past and memory doesn’t work narratively that way. You can’t really remember it anything other than as bemusings and flavors. To create something that would make an arc would have been too clear.

Ariel Sheen

Do you find yourself more or less alienated living in New York than you were in South Florida?

Paul Kwiatkowski

OVERCAST_7 I mean, I think a lot of the alienation that I wrote about had to do with just being a teenager. Plus Florida is kind of an isolated place to grow up. Not living in close proximity to people, I never felt like there was a community there. When I read your review of my book, like, I also remember wanting to go downtown, which was really just a movie theatre, and it being like a 40 minute ride just for that. As a teenage I hated that but I feel at this point in my life you can use that to your advantage creatively and just call it solitude.

Living in New York, well, I feel that your experience of the city largely depends on what you make of it. One thing I think is funny is that so many people come here with purpose and certain expectation of what will happen with it. Once that goes away, I think it becomes less exciting. Didn’t you use to live here? What did you think?

Ariel Sheen

Yeah, I did. My experience was largely the same. But I was in grad school so there was a large number of people to socialize with had the same purpose as me. The school encouraged meetings through a number of free food/drink events. But even then there was always this temporary element to any connection we had in the back of our minds. Or at least in the back of my mind. Something like we can be friendly now, but in a year or so we’ll be in totally different places of the country doing totally different things and so will lose track of each other. When I lived in Bushwick it wasn’t like that so much.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Oh nice, I like Bushwick. I saw Genesis P-Orridge play there last week.

Ariel Sheen

Awesome. I’m a little jealous. And a lot surprised! I don’t encounter a lot of people that know who that is. When I was about 16-17 I got really into industrial music. Through my investigations into the genre I came across him and a number of other… unusual musicians via V. Vale Re/Search Publications like Industrial Culture Handbook and his book on William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle. I wasn’t always appreciative of the music, thought I did send Vale a demo I’d made, but I liked the innovative qualities of it. I mean a lot of it, like, sounds really weird.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah I remember hearing them around the same time. Right about the same time I got into writing. I was mostly into Throbbing Gristle. I think it just really changed the way I go about making art. I think that’s what I got the most out of it. You know, Industrial or whatever electronic music name you want to call it just totally blew my imagination away. It definitely was inspiring and I definitely didn’t like every song to just get into the vibe of it. It was kind of a big influence. That stuff was just really. Man. Just finding out about it as a kid was inspiring. Maybe even more so than the products that the artists made. It definitely got me in tune with process and experimentation.

Ariel Sheen

So say 30-40 years from now, when there is no South Florida; How do you think you’ll respond to that?

Paul Kwiatkowski

d5551cf814407980-OVERCAST_0198 It’ll be bitter sweet. There’s a lot of things that I love about Florida that I credit with my imagination. It seems inevitable though… Right? You should check out this book called Finding Florida. It’s just about this history of Florida and how it’s this state that’s never been able to be tamed. From the early Conquistadors that went there thinking they’d find gold. It goes from how thy not only didn’t finding gold but it was the only state that doesn’t have any rocks in the ground. Then tells about how later settlers tried to damn the waters but that storms kept flooding and destroying them. Then the elections and Bush. It’s this like, comprehensive history that this state has manipulated the people that have tried to harness it. Thus if Florida went up it’d just be fitting. It just has this entire history of kicking people back and that’d be just one more instance of it.

Ariel Sheen

I think you’re really on point about the land we call Florida not wanting the practices of white settlers. I’ve actually studied a lot Florida history and am also writing a book myself set there/here right now. Besides the North, prior to the Civil War, it was the Glades that had the largest population of runaway slaves. These were those that escaped and then acculturated themselves to the indigenous people in this land that at the time just could not be brought under the till.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Yeah, the Seminoles, right? The mix of races: free slaves and indigenous.

Ariel Sheen

Yeah, exactly! So from your 2011 Street Carnage interview I saw that you were reading a lot of literature that dealt with… unusual and extreme topics and themes. Because you and I are the same age I had this feeling that, well, in high school the setting of EDWO, at the time my group of friends was reading a lot of Poppy Z. Brite. She wrote Lost Souls and was wondering if you’d ever read it…

Paul Kwiatkowski

Haha. You know it’s funny I too was reading Poppy Z. Brite. I was a huge fan of Exquisite Corpse, which was one of my favorites.

Ariel Sheen

 Yes! That book was so great!

Paul Kwiatkowski
You know it’s funny, I picked up the book again a year ago and it’s still really good. She’s kind of a kick as writer. So transgressive as well. It’s so impressive. Other than her, at the time I was also getting into Dennis Cooper and he definitely had a big influence on my approach to writing. Oh, and I started to discover Bret Easton Elis. There’s a book called Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke.
It had a goth feel to it. I was just a voracious reader and was just really discovering literature at that time. I also remember reading In the Belly of the Beast and being really impressed by that. I worked at Borders so I had a lot of access to books. And a lot of the French Surrealists like Bataille and the Marquis se Sade. I’m glad I got that stuff out of my system as a teenager and not as an adult.

Ariel Sheen

That’s so funny. I also worked at Borders, briefly, and when I was there Mike [the guy I know in one of the photos] was one of the floor managers.

Paul Kwiatkowski

That’s really wild.

Ariel Sheen

Going back to the Street Carnage interview, you’d mentioned then that you were working on a project from your trip to the Caribbean and Mexico, are you still working on that project? Or something else?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Haha! I don’t even remember what that project was, but at the moment I am working on a new book about Minnesota. Which is a large departure from those project. I’m working with a photographer who’s from Minnesota that’s now based in Medellin in Colombia. The book is about an airplane accident that claimed his cousin and photography’s relationship to technology. So it’s kind of like a mix between an Adam Curtis documentary with… I don’t even know what you’d say it’s mixed with…

Ariel Sheen

Cool. Interesting that you say that. I showed The Power of Nightmares in my Debate Classes to help students better contextualize the rhetoric their subjected to in the news.

Anyway, last question. So I bought the paperback edition of the And Everyday was Overcast for $30 and then learned that there’s an audio component that came for free with the $6 digital edition. Think you can send me that?

Paul Kwiatkowski

Oh, I can send it to you! I think it’s on my site. The soundtrack is part of the digital edition that I had done for my published that I did with Ryan DeShawn. It was actually heavily inspired by Genesis P-Orridge and Throbbing Gristle. I wanted to illustrate that Retard Radio storyline that runs through the book and, you know, in addition to going back to Florida and collecting pictures I’d go back and collect sounds. Something that always really stuck out in my memory of Florida was the sounds. It’s such an alive state. It’s constantly buzzing and grinding. It’s something that always fascinated me so I wanted to put something together as a companion piece to the book. But yeah, I’ll send you a zip file of it in a little bit.

Ariel Sheen

Cool, I’d like that.

Paul Kwiatkowski

No problem, I like that you’re interested in it. It was a cool experiment.

Ariel Sheen

Yeah. It sounds like it. And hearing you talk about it, it sounds like a friend of mine’s music production process that I just heard about on NPR that also left Florida for New York. Hopefully I can make it back there in two or three years.

Paul Kwiatkowski

Well it seems like you’re doing well over there, teaching and writing.

Ariel Sheen

That’s true, but that’s only after a long period of some personal hardships. No need to get into that, though. Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me.

Paul Kwiatkowski

My pleasure, it was good talking to you!

You can purchase And Every Day Was Overcast by clicking the title and learn more about Paul Kwiatkoski’s current projects by clicking here.

You can also read more interviews with the author that may or may not deal with topics of greater substance here.

Featureshoot Interview

Air Ship Daily

Street Carnage Interview

Miami's Economic and Racial Segregation in Unraveling

One of the themes within my book is race’s role in economic and political power. Each part of the series is a first person perspective with worldview that differs dramatically based upon their historical consciousness and the desires they wish to fulfill.

In Book 1, Jesses displays what I and other philosophers of race would call racial ignorance. What does this mean? Pulling from concepts explicated by Frantz Fanon’s in his book Black Skin, White Masks, we learn that whites often lack the experience of systematic prejudice and thus there is a knowing and unknowing of race. Whites can conceptualize race, but have only the experience of the privileged “norm” rather than the racialized Other and thus are unable (or unwilling) to perceive, understand, acknowledge, or relate to the general condition and experiences of non-whites.

Given the widely-touted multi-racial nature of Miami this seems to not fit with normal expectations. However the below maps and history are an attempt to give greater contextualization to how Jesse came to this worldview and also gives background to other characters perspectives on the role of race to their worldview.

Unfortunately this ethnic map of Miami doesn’t also show the history of legislation and settlement to the many cities and townships that make up Miami, Miami Beach and it’s surrounding areas. Including this sort of data we would begin to get a larger understanding of why the composition of the region is that way that it is.

Where people are living in overcrowded units.

As you can see here, in areas that are the poorest people are living in the densest arrangements. While there is little statistical breakdown by the City of Miami of what the percentages relate to in material conditions, from this data and that elsewhere we can see that two bedrooms apartments housing five or more people is normal. If this were the case we would find many of the circumstances described by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Case for Reparations. From the founding of the City of Miami and Miami Beach the patterns of habitations were guided by racial segregationist legislation that was enforced through a combination of policing and intermittent mob actions.

White politicians consistently sought to and successfully deprived black entrepreneurs from accumulating capital in white areas as well as their enterprises in black towns, rabidly fought unionization and collective bargaining campaigns and targeted social justice activists for harassment and assassination. While expanding along the beachfront to the east, whites captured formerly black areas through eminent domain and corrupt housing practices that pushed black west into higher density housing areas.

medhhincbgtemp — Miami’s Median Household Incomes.

This and the patterns of public transportation directly informed the type of labor available to black-American and Caribbean populations (and later Latin American groups) as well as their ability to demand political change, their ability to use public goods and services as well as their housing options.

Justifications for an inflated police state and greater surveillance of the population at first stemmed from the second World War and the fear of destabilizing acts by foreigners. The work pass system, started in the 1930s, mandated that black and white workers in the tourist sector wear passes, for instance.

This theme would pop up again in various forms in order to legitimize greater oversight of black bodies and delegitimize political opposition to such acts by the government. Jim Crow, in a word, formed thoroughly enmeshed the patterns of habitation, political power and labor in the nascent Miami, which as late as 1953 was, according to Robe Carson, was a “Tropical Frontier” that had not yet been fully conquered by the white race. How so? Well even after 1943, when this threat was no longer credible, and into the 1960’s these passes served to reinforce an apartheid style urban geography.

Various counties created and enforced curfews to keep blacks out of white areas both through their police departments and white vigilantes. Later political upheavals were blamed by foreign agitators from northern Florida and New York to prevent the granting of political demands. The worldview promulgated by local papers was that local blacks were happy with their conditions and it was only because of outside influence that civic unrest occasionally erupted. Racism in the police forces in these and other areas continues to this day.

povbg — Where the Pockets of Poverty Are in Miami.

As the shows, the high rate of poverty in Miami communities of color was not caused by cultural character flaws but by a sustained and systematic assault by the local white and even Federal government policies towards maintaining segregation, preventing communities of color from having access to beachfront property on the larger scale keeping trade going with Caribbean dictatorships that were able to extract higher rates of surplus capital from their investments due to authoritarian practices.

The later success of Cuban communities is often cited as a reason as to why it is a cultural character flaw, however this belies the capital and advanced educational degrees that many first wave migrants were able to bring with, the federal assistance that they were given, the longer history of successful political mobilization they’d experienced and accrued as sociopolitical capital as well as the notion of the first wave as “white people”.

Miamians continues to suffer as a result of it’s past. It’s continuously named as one of the worst places to live, it lacks a comprehensive plan to combat global climatic change due to the interests of land developers – the most powerful political lobby in Florida – it’s politicians and police are recurrently in the press for corruption and illegal acts and as anyone who’s familiar with it knows it’s vast area could be greatly reorganized for more rational and equitable land usage. This is all intimately tied to municipal government development and the influence of predominantly white capital on the areas political economy.

Jesse, however, isn’t aware of any of this. He hasn’t learned this data in his history class. His parents are, like many others living in South Florida, are not natives nor are they aware of it’s history so cannot pass this information along. The private high school he previously attended was predominantly white, as is par for South Florida Private Schools, so he’s not interacted with many black people until last year when he entered a public school. As a result of his growing recognition of the nature of political power and through the course of his increased interaction with black people, however, Jesse comes to have greater awareness of the racial environment of Miami and, in his later book, the surrounding regions. Jesse’s epistemological development is thus not aptly described by calling his views in the beginning racist but ignorant. Furthermore this is not an active ignorance that seeks to maintain privilege but one that seeks ruthlessness to understand and critique how power operates. At each step of his epistemological development Jesse comes to a state of greater empathy, understanding and recognizes a greater duty towards, to bring it back to Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

References

A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida by N. D. B. Connolly

Miami Beach police shared hundreds of racist and pornographic emails

Fort Lauderdale Cops Fired for Sharing Racist Text Messages and Videos

Old South, New South, or Down South?: Florida and the Modern Civil Rights Movement by Irvin D. S. Winsboro

Take Back the Land by Max Rameau

America’s Most Miserable Cities

100 YEARS: The Dark And Dirty History Of Miami Beach

On Choosing a Proper Cover for Unraveling: Book 1

I thought that coming up with a book cover for Unraveling would be easy, but it’s turned into a project. My first idea was to look for a stock photo that captured enough of the elements of one of the scenes in the chapter and then to slap some text over it with the title and my name. I searched through ShutterStock for a good several hours using terms that were appropriate for Jesse’s chapter. Teenagers. Drug Abuse. Gangs. Addiction. Recovery. Secrets. Espionage. Isolation. etc. The amount of images that I went through was, well, staggering. Finally, I alighted upon this image!

I liked it immediately and purchased it. My thought process in doing so was that though the image doesn’t depict Jesse Oberman, a bright and driven 16 year old boy trying to deal with a number of major changes in his life that he doesn’t fully understand or know how to deal with, the image is a pretty damn good physical approximation of Josselyn, a character that Jesse meets in Book 1. The items around her, the gun, mask and money, are also components of their relations so it seems appropriate. Lastly, who wouldn’t be intrigued enough into making a small purchase of a serial novel by a pretty woman with these items around them.

From here I then decided to use the Cracked font for the author attribution and title, then Age of Unraveling. I chose the Cracked font as a means of highlighting the social/political/economic disintegration prevalent within the plot. I’d previously chosen Unraveling as a title, again referring to the themes of the book, but had added Age of to it as a nod to British Historian Eric Hobsbawm. Whereas Hobsbawm wrote with insightful and compelling mastery about the upheavals over 202 years at a high level of abstraction, Unraveling is set over a two year period at a very low level of abstraction wherein characters deal with this historical inheritance. To make the name stand out I made the text black with a red drop shadow. Happy that the picture related if not to Jesse than at least a character he meets in Book 1 and confident that the text alluded to a breaking down of social order I shared this on my Facebook and asked for input.

The response that I got from my friends upon sharing my work was unanimous and disheartening. Time and money spent on that cover were, in their view, a waste. The image was “cheesy” and the text looked awful. Trusting of my friends input I decided to scrap it for a new one. I would not have to do so alone, however, as my brother Jaz said he would help me. He forwarded me a couple of test images, shown below, so that I could help guide him as to what I want.

One of the concept designs for the cover.

I like both of these a lot. Here’s why:

I like the one on the right as it shows a youth, presumably Jesse, in an out of focus manner, hinting at the internal conflict he is going through while interacting with an external world that he wants to mold to his will. The one on the right, however, I can’t use (or can I?) as it is the same stock photo used by the musician James Blake on his album James Blake.

A more appropriate textual rendition of the title.

I like the one on the left as it hints at the accelerating chaos from the unexpected confluence of a number of people/events. Because of this I feel that the lack of a human beings on it not to be so big an issue.

Given that one of the uncommented-upon-by-the-characters conflicts within the book is between Hegelian and Nietzschean conceptions of time, history, law and agency I find myself drawn to a typography that looks like this True Detective poster from season 1.

After I informed Jaz of the the right cover imaged was used by James Blake, he produced the one below as a well as another one with the title text more distorted which I prefer but don’t have a copy of. In this cover iteration we also decided to include a one line thematic description of Book 1: “His life is falling apart and he’s taking everyone with him.”

Like the text and the short description, but not the background image. — Another concept for the cover based on the above right one being used on James Blake’s self-titled album.

He also encouraged me to look over other covers at Designspiration, which is a great resource for ideation of covers. There were many that I liked there as well as on the website for Face Out Books. I was especially drawn to the aesthetics relying upon the placement of multiple covers as there will be several more books in the series. There were so many choices that I felt overwhelmed.

Lastly I decided to do a little digging onto cover ideas on my own. I’m not extensively well read when it comes to pulp/noir novels, but as I’ve always found myself intrigued by the aesthetics of pulp covers and as it was in part a response to my enjoyment of reading the major works of novelists Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler which made me include elements of classic noir fiction (though with a much more progressive worldview) into Unraveling – I also decided to look through Pulp Curry. Some of the pulp covers that I liked are below, though given the number of modern stylistic and narrative elements in it as well as the expenses in producing these original drawings this seems to be a dead end.

mcginnis — Book cover of a book of book covers. How meta!

2014-09-23-pulp-covers-maguire-04 — Not sure if this was a book cover, but I like the image.

7775165196_133d5a5e7c_h — Male gaze in full effect here and in every other pulp novel.

noir-art-ernest-chiriaka-jealous-paul-daniels-via-pulpart-tumblr — Irony: In Unraveling the women trap the men.

I think that the pulp covers would work for some of the female characters books, but not for Jesse. I think it’d be double interesting as most of the females break from being the typical passive object that they are in these types of works and are heroes fighting a toxic form of masculinity and making up for the failings of their male comrades. I don’t want to go to much into this so that you’ll want to see what I mean by reading subsequent books, but did want to point out the irony that would occur if such a détournement was ever made.

All this said, as of now I’ve decided on the following post. I like the oldness of the map – which relates to the repetition of patterns in this area of the world. I’d like to change the font to something more stylized – but I plan on doing this after the publication of the third part of the book as then I plan on getting physical copies published and making them available for sale.

51dmBUT5AGL

Where Jesse runs in Unraveling: Book 1

Jesse Oberman’s plans for the summer go sideways after discovering that his parents have decided to send him to a drug rehabilitation and leadership program called Natural Living. Natural Living is based upon the Outward Bound program that deals with troubled youth. The reason that Jesse doesn’t go to one of the many treatment and recovery centers in Miami, Book 2 spoiler alert, is that his mother’s boyfriend wanted to have the summer alone with her.

Some of the many rehab facilities in Miami.

Jesse emphatically does not want to go to into the program or to the Everglades. From a high enough vantage point it appears that there are no people inhabiting the region at all.

Souther Tip of Florida — Settlements to the right, Everglades to the left.

This, however, is not true. The Everglades have been continuously occupied by various peoples since 1000 B.C. The Calusa were there first, but their population was decimated by disease and guns by colonial settlers who thought that the land could be easily tamed for intensive agriculture. The land, not a swamp but a river of grass wholly unique in the world, was not easily changed a la the Dutch model nor were the indigenous people that moved there from north easily tamed.

Closer up view of a town in the middle of nowhere.

The Muscogee Creek Confederacy was a large civilization in the Mississippi basin area the had lived in the area for some two-thousand years. Faced with dispossession and genocidal actions of the American government and militant settlers, these peoples had two options – to go further west or to go south into areas unsettled by whites. Going west meant conflict with other tribes and continued conflict with White settlers. Going south meant adjusting to life in a radically new environment. Since the

Escaped slaves in Northern Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas were faced with similar considerations. To make a long trip up North where there chances of getting caught were high or to go to the Glades and seek refuge.

The Miccosukee and the Seminoles came to be composed of a mix of indigenous tribes and the descendants of tribesman from Africa. Though their original languages and cultures were different, Creek soon became the common tongue and white men the common enemy. The unpleasant climate and difficulty for agriculture allowed what became the largest haven in the U.S. South for runaway slaves. This was impressive not only for this fact but also as the people’s there were able to organize and lead the largest slave revolt – the 2nd Seminole War – in U.S. history that lead to the only emancipation of rebellious slaves prior to the U.S. Civil War. This and subsequent bellicosity when faced with continued aggression by the Federal government lead to the Seminole epithet of “unconquered tribe”.

Unraveling — Close up of Miccosukee Indian Village and the gas station where Jesse tries to flee from Natural Living.

Jesse’s entrance into the Everglades and the experiences that he has there should thus not be seen simply as a “rehab and recovery trip”. In Unraveling the only mention of white society’s impact on the Everglades is the early 20th century government’s spreading of melaleuca seeds (now considered an invasive exotic that current taxpayers must pay to destroy) by plane to soak up the fresh water, the introduction of pythons that have decimated the natural wildlife and the alteration of the region via dikes and levies operated by the South Florida Water Management District. Despite this lacuna of discussion, this deeper history remains in the land at a deeper level and Jesse’s speedy adaptation to life there as well as the mystical experience he has directly before he returns home should be seen as his unconscious connection to this history.

References

National Park Service: Everglades

River of Grass

The Enduring Seminoles

Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.

Beginning of Chapter Quotes from Unraveling: Book 1

Below are the chapter titles and quotes that introduce them in Unraveling: Book 1. I chose them to reflect developments in Jesse’s character and also as they provide deeper context for the circumstances that he faces or other people that he becomes involved with. I also find that the quotes, which touch upon large social, political and economic trends, present a compelling contrast to the plot of the first book of Unraveling. Jesse’s story does deal with existential issues, but is more like the No Exit of Al-Sadiiq Banks than the No Exit of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Discipline

“…All human life, from the very beginning of its development within capitalist society, has undergone an impoverishment. More than this, capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. Young people still have the strength to refuse this death; they are able to rebel against domestication. They demand to live. But to those great numbers of smugly complacent people, who live on empty dreams and fantasies, this demand, this passionate need just seems irrational, or, at best, a paradise which is by definition inaccessible.”

– Jacques Camatte

Primitive Accumulation

“One capitalist always kills many.”

– Karl Marx

Reinvestment

“Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit. A totally different spiritual attitude has become essential – and it can only be brought into being by making our unconscious desires conscious and by creating entirely new ones.”

– Guy Debord

Entrepreneurship

“During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war is of every man against every man… Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.”

– Thomas Hobbes

Espionage

“Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

– Edward Snowden

Transportation, Distribution and Logistics

“What kind of society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that kind of system.”

– Milton Friedman

Marketing

“He who does not know how to deceive does not know how to rule.”

-Rafael Trujillo

Regulation

“What do I care about the law. Ain’t I got the power?”

– Cornelius Vanderbilt

Conference

“True capitalists reinvest their surplus into the community. They don’t have to be coerced through increased taxation.”

-Adam Smith