Author: Katie Bradshaw

Katie Bradshawhttp://ktbradshaw.comI am or have been a writer, museum director, runner, blogger, baker-of-gingerbread-houses, teacher, researcher, scientist, reader, stained glass crafter, microbrew aficionado, world traveler, study abroad advisor, cyclist, and journalist. I live or have lived in Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois.
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Amtrak residency for writers

Dang!

Wish I’d heard about the Amtrak Residency for Writers earlier (though, indeed, I would not have been in a position to apply for it at the time).

What a neat opportunity!

(Genius marketing move, Amtrak!)

Something like 16,000 people applied for the residency, and 24 were selected. Well, 25, if you include the original writer-in-residence.

Would it have given me an edge if my dad is a railfan and I was the first child and was named after a railroad? (The Missouri-Kansas-Texas. The M-K-T. The Katy.)

Would it have given me an edge if I had applied to work for Amtrak out of Chicago during the summers when I was in college? (By the time they called me with a job offer, the semester had started again, and I had to decline.)

In any case, the program will give me some reading material, as I peruse the writings of the chosen writers-in-residence.

Aside

Fun with words

On the The Loft Literary Center Writer’s Block blog today, Valerie Cabrera shared this post, which mentions the Google Poetics blog.

Valerie muses about the “found poem” writing technique, and how a Google autocomplete list, while random, can be quite profound:

Although Google isn’t Burroughs, or Shakespeare, or Dickinson, it still manages to shed light on the inner workings of the human mind, our wild hopes and our bizarre fears, our absurd worries and our crazy wonderings.

I have many times enjoyed the fun of playing with Google autocomplete. There was a social media meme going around awhile back to post the top autocomplete suggestions for “[your name] needs”. Here are my current ones:

Katie needs money monday
Katie needs kickstarter
Katie needs twitter

Another bit of fun I used to have with Google was to take a phrase and run it through Google translate, through at least five different languages, and then translate it back into its home language. The results were often tear-jerkingly funny. Alas, Google Translate has gotten a lot better over the years, and the phrases wind up fairly close to what you started with. (That, or I’m just not as good at coming up with connivingly difficult sentences to translate at the moment.)

I got a sweet deal, and I feel like a million bucks.
English>German>Japanese>Swedish>Thai>Bengali>English
I have a sweet deal, and I feel like a million.

I have a fond memory of accompanying a friend to her friend’s band practice in a sketchy empty warehouse and entertaining myself by tearing words out of a pile of abandoned newspapers and creating found poetry on the floor.

And who can forget Magnetic Poetry?

What kinds of fun do you have with words?

The Happiness Project – a book review

happiness-project-coverI’m in a place right now where I am working to improve my own happiness. I recently left a high-profile job with a lot of responsibility, and am embarking on a period of self-development – namely, doing a lot of reading and writing.

So when “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin happened to pass my eyeballs, I added it to my to-read list.

The book is formatted into chapters by month, where the author describes the different resolutions she made in her research-backed yearlong pursuit of improving her happiness.

Make time. Buy needful things. Go off the path. Work smart. Quit nagging.

This is essentially a self-help book framed within personal anecdotes. Self-help books in general tend to grate on me, but I found this book enjoyable to read because many of the anecdotes are amusing, and because I can relate to many of the author’s foibles (among them, the need to feel “legitimate”).

This is a good “read one chapter a night” kind of book. Much more than that, and it started to feel a bit overwhelming and preachy to me. I was also a bit annoyed with the quantity of quotes the author inserts from people who commented on her blog. To me, the overuse of quotes broke up her voice too much.

As the author repeatedly points out in the book, each person’s happiness project would be different. In fact, when she posted her personal “twelve commandments” that guided development of her resolutions and asked readers of her blog to come up with their own resolutions, she was amused to discover that some of her readers’ commandments contradicted one another. The parts of the book that resonated with me might not strike others the same way.

Below are a few of the things I highlighted in the book. Because of my current life focus, a lot of the quotes are career-related. Someone going through relationship troubles might find other passages worthy of highlighting.

I won’t take up a lot of space analyzing what these phrases mean to the author, or to me. If you are intrigued, I recommend checking out the book.

(Feel free to criticize my over-use of quotes and breaking up my “author’s voice.”)

First Splendid Truth: to be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

Work can be a source of many of the elements necessary for a happy life: the atmosphere of growth, social contact, fun, a sense of purpose, self-esteem, recognition.

One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. … Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened. … Also, a new identity brings you into contact with new people and new experiences, which are also powerful sources of happiness.

… though you may anticipate great happiness in arrival, arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.

The fun part doesn’t come later, now is the fun part.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go work on my list of commandments . . .

Copyright 2015 by Katie Bradshaw