Insomnia

Sandra Parshall

I can’t sleep.

Night after night, I either can’t get to sleep or can’t stay asleep. The only member of the household who feels good about this is Emma, who takes being a nocturnal feline seriously and appreciates company while she’s busy being a cat. Our other cat, an Abyssinian named Gabriel, is zonked out by midnight and doesn’t stir until the alarm goes off, if then.

I want to be more like Gabriel and less like Emma.

It’s not that I can’t sleep at all. Put me in a darkened movie theater and I will promptly fall asleep, regardless of how much I want to see the film. I fall asleep during my favorite TV shows. If I stopped typing right now and closed my eyes, I know I would fall asleep at the computer.

What I can’t do is sleep reliably when and where I’m supposed to. Before you rush to suggest counting sheep, drinking milk, etc., let me tell you that I’ve tried everything. I still can’t sleep.

I’m determined to fix this, and I’m attacking the problem the way I approach most situations that need to be changed: I’m researching the heck out of it.

One comforting thing I’ve discovered – although I realize it shouldn’t please me – is that I am far from alone. We have an epidemic of insomnia in the U.S. An estimated 23 percent of workers suffer from it, and the economic toll in lost productivity is in the billions. 

What causes it? According to the National Institutes of Health, we are afflicted with two distinct varieties of sleeplessness: secondary, due to medical problems, medications, and other physical causes; and primary, due to – who knows? I think I have the “who knows?” variety, which means the prospect of relief is not good.

But wait. The February issue of Psychology Today reports on new research into the role that light plays in human wake/sleep cycles. Not just any light, but blue light, part of the visible spectrum of solar rays. During the day, blue light suppresses the release of melatonin, the hormone that puts us to sleep after the sun goes down. If we don’t get enough sun during the day, our natural circadian rhythm is disrupted. The artificial light in the home and workplace is no substitute for natural light.

In short, if you don’t get outdoors in the natural light for at least part of the day, you may not be able to sleep when you go to bed. Furthermore, light rays emitted by TV sets mimic blue light, so if you watch television late at night before retiring, your body will be confused about what time it is.

Epidemiologist Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School recommends that employers who want to increase productivity provide workers with a sunshine break every day. That goes for those of us who work at home too. Facing a big window while we work can help. (I face a wall while I’m writing, with the window behind me.) While we’re soaking up the sun’s rays, we should take our sunglasses off, because they can block blue light.

Help is available from another quarter: the light boxes and lamps made for people with seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of cyclical depression caused by lack of sunlight, also work for insomniacs. I’ve just ordered a blue light lamp for my desk. I’ve also promised myself that I will get more natural light, not just during warm weather when I love being outdoors, but during the short, cold days of winter as well.

I look forward to getting a good night’s sleep soon. Emma, you’re on your own.

True Leaves

Sharon Wildwind

I had a wonderful high school biology teacher. I guess I should say I had a wonderful botany teacher.

Miss R. wasn’t keen on things with legs, tails, beaks, wings, etc., but she had an abiding fascination with plants, and a none too shabby ability to draw them.

Hers was a big corner classroom with two walls of windows and two walls of blackboards. This was in the day when black boards were really black and overhead projectors were that newfangled gadget in the corner of the classroom.

Every Monday morning, immense colored chalk drawings of plant life cycles filled every inch of blackboard space. Rumor was that Miss R. went to church Sunday morning, had lunch with her sister, and then spent Sunday afternoon drawing. Looking at the delicate shadings and riot of colors, I believed it.

If you didn’t have a Miss R. in your life, here are the basics. Plants are classified as monocotyledons (one grass-like seed leaf), dicotyledons (two seed leaves) or gymnosperms (like evergreen trees), which are the free thinkers of the plant world and might have anything from zero to eight seed leaves. The root part of a seed is particularly sensitive to gravity. It grows down. The shoot and seed leaves crave light. They grow up. This happens even if they are planted inches deep. They still shoot straight up, aiming for that unseen light as fast as possible.

Growing in the dark has the charming name skotomorphogenesis, which is a spelling bee tie-breaker if I’ve every heard one. Growth takes place without sunlight, without chlorophyll, and depends solely on the energy stored in the seed.

Hitting light is the game-changer. The growth pattern changes to photomorphogenesis, which means that the plant starts making its own food from sunlight. The seed leaves shoot chlorophyll down into the plant, strengthening the root and the stem and out of that energy infusion the first true leaves are born. Seed leaves are usually round green things or long green things, but its in the first true leaves that you get an idea of what the adult plant will look like.

Miss R., seeds and the various morphogenesis have been on my mind recently because I’m in transition from my seed leaves to my true leaves.

I’ve been serious about getting published for a little over a decade. When I started, I was like that plant buried inches deep in the soil. I had a sense where the light might be, but couldn't see it. With the help of a lot of wonderful writers, I managed to aim in the true direction and reach the surface.

Five books published, one more almost here, a seventh being written and dabbling in play writing isn’t a bad tally for my first decade. I’m on the Web, maybe not exactly where I want to be, but I’m there. I teach an occasional class and do a lot of other things related to writing. So you might justifiably think that I’m far past that seed leaf reaching for the light stage. I’m not sure you’d be right.

Shortly now I’ll retire from my day job and, I hope, have more time and energy to focus on writing. I’ve always anticipated that transition as a real marker in my career, a lot like those seed leaves shooting chlorophyll down into the root and expecting the plant to begin making its own food.

I wonder if the plant, like me, gets nervous at this stage? After all, we’ve both had a good ride nibbling off the energy stored in the seed. Can I make it on my own, spread my true leaves, and grow at an even faster rate?

I’m betting that I can. And I can't wait to see what my adult leaves will look like.

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I don’t start a piece knowing exactly what effect it's going to have. There is a seed of an idea that I could never articulate, right at the beginning of the piece, literally like one cell.

~Siobhan Davies, dancer and founder of the Siobhan Davies Dance Company

The Benefit (and Deconstruction) of Failure

by Julia Buckley

I recently watched this clip of J.K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard commencement address. She called it "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination." I thought it was a stunning address, and that the seemingly shy Rowling was actually quite a forceful speaker when she warmed to her theme.

In addition to that inspirational speech, I am often inspired by my senior students' college essays, which they bring to me for editorial help. One young woman, in a recent essay, suggested (with sincerity, I think) that failure was more important to her than was success; her assertion was that she learned more from failure, and that ultimately it was a more valuable experience.

This wise interpretation of life's setbacks, both by Rowling and my student, had me thinking of the various setbacks I've suffered in life. For a writer, every setback, every perceived "failure," is a slap to the ego, or so I have always seen it--and I assume that other writers might be tempted to view it in the same way.

But if I apply Jacques Derrida's notion of Deconstruction, then I can look at success and failure as binary oppositions, with success being the privileged term. However, my students' interpretation of the two make failure the privileged term, and suggests that through failure, one learns, grows, and ultimately finds benefit, so that failure itself guarantees a level of success.

However, deconstruction also asserts that language is ambiguous, uncertain, ever-changing, and that existence has no center. Derrida would suggest, I believe, that the undecidability of any text, including the one I just created above, implies a multiplicity of meanings, and therefore ultimately has no meaning, or at least not one ultimate meaning.

Writing (and the complex universe of publishing) can render anyone existential, and ultimately we all have to make our own decisions about the notions of success or failure, but these two works--a great writer's speech and a young woman's tentative paper--have me feeling optimistic about my own perceived defeats.

A philosophical challenge for the day. :)

(photo: my son at Lake Michigan, 2011).

Pilot Down, Presumed Dead

This guest blog was written by Colorado writer Mark Stevens, whose book BURIED BY THE ROAN is now available; it provides a suspenseful mystery while examining the greed that still endangers the American west. See more about Stevens and his writing here.

PILOT DOWN, PRESUMED DEAD

by Mark Stevens

Yeah, I know, what a title. I was nine or ten. I can practically see the precise shelf in the library where I found this book in Lincoln, Massachusetts. (And, yeah, I know: lucky me—raised in such a cool spot, among readers and thinkers.)

Did it take me a day to read? A week? I don’t remember. But it was utter, pure adventure. Man versus nature wasn’t a theme I understood or grasped at the time, but Pilot Down, Presumed Dead took this suburban kid to the edge of the survival and let me worry and fret as Steve Ferris scrambled to survive. When I read this book—-by the way, thank you Marjorie Phleger—-I was completely transported. I think it was the first time I recognized that fiction had the power to pull you into the moment of someone else’s life so completely you really don’t even know you’re reading.

That’s magic. Pure freaking magic. And, like a lot of “first time” things, I recall it vividly.
When I found a copy of Pilot Down a few years back, I brought it on a trip and my daughter read it in just a few beach sittings (that’s her in the photo).

To this day, this is my favorite theme.

Loners in the wild, out on the edge.

To Build A Fire, by Jack London. Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, both by Jon Krakauer. Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson. Blind Descent, by Nevada Barr. (Anna Pigeon’s hairy, tight trek down the caves of Carlsbad Cavern is an absolute classic loner tale. I read an interview with Nevada Barr and she said she has claustrophobia. I think that comes through.)

Into the Silence by Wade Davis, about the attempts by the British and specifically George Mallory to summit Mt. Everest in the early 1920’s (a mind-blowing account). River of Doubt, by Candice Millard. And, recently, Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson, a brilliant genre-bending “mystery” that involves climbing a gnarly Wyoming mountain in a howling winter storm with the irascible Walt Longmire (and a paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno in his back pocket). Delicious stuff—thriller, suspense, mystery and literature all bound up in a tasty meatball of fiction.

I know that’s a mixed list—fiction and non.

Doesn’t matter to me; just take me away via Magic Book Transporter Beam and I will follow.
Non-fiction, of course, is a matter of researching the details, getting the story arc right and re-telling the struggle. I’m not saying one is harder than the other. It’s not. They are different beasts. But to create a fictional setting and insert a character we care about into the fray against Mother Nature and all she can hurl at our hero is, to me, art. I don’t necessarily want to make the actual journey, of course, just soak it in via words.

I know the P.O.V. in The Call of The Wild is half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, but I think Buck nails the feeling any reader gets when you come across a story you just have to devour:

“Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.”

R.L.Stevenson and the Key to Happiness

The great Robert Louis Stevenson compiled this list of things that were (to him) the key to happiness. It's ironic to me that RLS, ill for much of his life and often suffering, wrote so many things that were positive, including one of my favorites, A Child's Garden of Verses.

How To Be Happy

By Robert Louis Stevenson

1. Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.

2. Make the best of your circumstances. No one has everything, and everyone has something of sorrow intermingled with gladness of life. The trick is to make the laughter outweigh the tears.

3. Don't take yourself too seriously. Don't think that somehow you should be protected from misfortune that befalls other people.

4. You can't please everybody. Don't let criticism worry you.

5. Don't let your neighbor set your standards. Be yourself.

6. Do the things you enjoy doing, but stay out of debt.

7. Never borrow trouble. Imaginary things are harder to bear than real ones.

8. Since hate poisons the soul, do not cherish jealousy, enmity, grudges. Avoid people who make you unhappy.

9. Have many interests. If you can't travel, read about new places.

10. Don't hold postmortems. Don't spend your time brooding over sorrow or mistakes. Don't be one who never gets over things.

11. Do what you can for those less fortunate than yourself.

12. Keep busy at something. A busy person never has time to be unhappy.

(cited from True Wealth, ed. Gary Morris).

Top picture: (a nighttime blizzard in the mighty winter of 2011; bottom photo: Wikipedia).

Quango

by Sheila Connolly

I met a new word this past week: quango.

Now, before you race for your dictionary (print or electronic), take a moment to think about what it might mean. Yes, it's a real word, although it is an acronym, that has come to serve as a word in its own right.

I stumbled upon it in on an Irish news network website—but no, it's not an Irish word (that would be cheating). I first laughed, and then I did a double take and reread it, to make sure I'd seen it correctly, because it sounded so silly.

It's not one of those new words that the cyberworld seems to spawn each year. In fact, the word has been around for decades. I just didn't notice it.

In my widely (wildly?) varied career, I've meandered through many fields and disciplines, each of which has its own vocabulary. Art history: chiaroscuro, tympanum, gesso, impasto, and so on. Investment banking: debenture, strips, CATS, swaps. Genealogy: Ahnentafel, linear versus collateral. Many of these may be borrowed from other sources or languages, but they acquire a different meaning within a field. The net result is that I have a brain stuffed with obscure words, most of which are useful only in crossword puzzles. (I'm keeping score to see how many crossword-puzzle-makers manage to squeeze "ern (var. erne)" into their puzzles. Do you know what that is?)

And then there's the aforementioned cyberlingo. Did you ever think you'd use "friend" as a verb? Or find yourself asking someone, would you please retweet my blog? Here, use this hashtag? Ten years ago this would have been gibberish to most of us (hey, I'm happy I can remember what "wysiwyg" is!). Now we see it every day, and even our televised newscasters use such references.

Language changes regularly, as it should. New applications require new words, or at least adopted and redefined (or should I say repurposed?) older ones. But the words need to catch and hold a person's attention, either because they're so appropriate or so blatantly inappropriate that they are unforgettable.

I would put quango in the latter category. It sounds silly, doesn't it? Like a game involving fruit, where the person who first fills a digital fruit basket has to yell "quango!" Nope, not even close. It could be Chinese, or garbled French (C'est ici un quangueau extraordinaire!), but it's not.

Give up? Here is the official definition: Quango derives from the term "quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization," first created in 1967 by Alan Pifer of the Carnegie Foundation, and shortened to "quango" (thank you!) by Anthony Barker, a British participant at a later conference. Interesting that we can pinpoint with that degree of precision exactly when the term came into being. It describes a kind of non-governmental organization that performs government functions, with or without the support of said government. I think our Fannie Mae (FNMA, the Federal National Mortgage Association) and Freddie Mac (Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, FHLMC) would fit that definition, although as I recall they were once labeled quasi-governmental agencies, and are now known as GSEs—government-sponsored enterprises.

Quango is a term used primarily in the UK, which has well over a thousand of the things. Ireland has nearly a thousand of its own, including the Abbey Theater, the National Gallery and National Library in Dublin, the Irish Tourist agency, and the main Irish news networks. I stumbled upon it when I read an Irish news headline stated that as part of the national austerity program, quangos would be reduced in number as a cost-cutting measure. Farewell, redundant and useless quangos—I hardly knew you.

But at least now you'll know it if you see it. Do you have favorite absurd word of your own?

The Elephants of Chiang Mai

Elizabeth Zelvin

I was fascinated to hear about a highlight of a friend’s recent trip to Thailand: a visit to the elephants of Chang Mai. These evidently world-famous elephants do a lot more than giving rides to tourists. (Not that I didn’t envy my friend who got to do it. I’ve always wanted to ride an elephant!) But these remarkable elephants play soccer.

They even do a happy dance when they score a goal.


This raised a lot of questions for me. For example, do elephants have team spirit?

Does the whole team do the happy dance when one elephant scores a goal? I learned that they perform individually with the ball, but don’t play an actual game. This suggests that elephants have community, but not competitive team spirit. Sports fans may disagree, but I think this is a good thing. Do people have to teach successive generations to play soccer, or do mothers teach the babies? I don’t know the answer to that one.


Even more remarkable, some of these elephants are painters. Yes, I said painters, producing some amazing works of art.

This raises more questions. For example, are they all creative artists, or are some of them critics? When their paintings are praised, even sold, are they happy for each other?

Again, I wonder if they are free of competitiveness and embrace the concept of a personal best for every elephant. I’d like to believe that the elephants of Chiang Mai excel in their ability to enjoy each other’s successes—just like mystery writers.

Fiction with a Message

Sandra Parshall

Some people believe that fiction writers, along with actors and musicians, should keep their opinions to themselves and do their work with no goal beyond entertaining an audience. No social or political messages should be allowed to make readers stop and think about real-world issues.

Fortunately, crime fiction authors have always ignored that advice, because they realize their characters don’t exist in a void and have to make their way in the same world readers inhabit. Some of the most popular mystery writers have proved it’s possible to present their own passionate viewpoints without losing readers. Carl Hiaasen is an anti-development crusader in south Florida and gets that across in his books, but readers are too busy laughing to object to having their consciousness raised about environmental issues. Long before Hiaasen, John D. MacDonald kept readers enthralled with mysteries that highlighted destructive development in the same fragile Florida ecosystem.

Many crime fiction writers explore a variety of today’s most sensitive social issues in their books. Julia Spencer-Fleming, for example, has woven mysteries around the plight of illegal migrant workers, teenage pregnancy and abandoned babies, violence against gays, and post-traumatic stress in soldiers returning from Iraq.

More often, though, writers focus on particular issues that mean the most to them. The challenge they face is finding fresh ways to weave those topics into entertaining stories. I asked three authors who are currently including environmental issues in their novels why they feel fiction is a good medium for their message and whether any readers have objected to being “educated” as they’re entertained.


“Crime fiction is a good medium for exploring ANY issue that people feel passionate about, because that passion, when pushed to the extreme, can lead to murder,” Beth Groundwater says. Beth writes a series featuring river ranger Mandy Tanner, who works on the Arkansas River in Colorado.

C.J. Lyons agrees. “All my crime fiction has a message, whether environmental or simply about everyday people finding the courage to become their own heroes.” C.J., a physician who began her career writing medical thrillers and now co-authors environmentally themed novels (Rock Bottom, Hot Water) with activist Erin Brockovich, says Brockovich sought her out as a writing partner because of the strong message about self-reliance in C.J.’s first series. “I feel fiction is an appropriate medium to explore issues, whether environmental, political, or moral/ethical. Crime fiction is the best venue because at its base you have the timeless struggle of good versus evil, and our job as writers is to explore all that messy gray area between the two.”

“Environmental thrillers offer a unique opportunity to educate readers about real-world problems in the context of an exciting story,” says thriller writer Karen Dionne. The world’s dwindling supply of clean water and misuse of this precious resource has been a major concern in Karen’s personal life and she explored the issue in her first book, Freezing Point. Her second, Boiling Point, is about the disastrous consequences of a radical scheme to end global warming. Both of Karen’s eco-thrillers, she notes, have been used as course material at the University of Delaware.

Whatever a book’s underlying message, telling a compelling tale must come first.

“I always try to balance things so the reader can make up their own mind without being preached to,” C.J. says. “Above all, my job is to entertain...the education comes in a close second, but if a book isn't entertaining, who's gonna read it in the first place?” She says she hasn’t heard any complaints, and in the case of the books co-written with Brockovich, some readers have asked for more information about mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia and the dangers of nuclear power.

Beth Groundwater always tries to see her writing through the eyes of a reader. “I complain when an author stops the action in the middle of a gripping story to stand on their soapbox and push (or have one of their characters push) their viewpoint on an issue,” she says. “I prefer to show how the issue affects my characters' lives, then let readers draw their own conclusions. For example, in Deadly Currents, I illustrate how water rights affects the lives of not only river rangers and rafters, but of everyone who lives and works in the water-starved American West. Because of my organic approach, I've never gotten a complaint from a reader about preaching my beliefs. I have, however, been told that I've opened readers' eyes about an issue and made them think more about it, even to the point of changing their opinion.”
 

Human impact on the natural world, and the constant push-and-pull between environmentalists and business, can be divisive and inflammatory, and Karen believes writers must keep this in mind. “I think more than most other kinds of fiction, environmental mysteries and thrillers walk a fine line. There's always going to be a certain amount of political and sociological baggage that goes with having written an eco-thriller. If a reader disagrees with the author's environmental position, that may well get in the way of their enjoying the story.” 

Some people simply aren’t interested in mysteries that are “about something.” One of Karen’s readers complained in an online review, “I sympathize with the message, but at the same time, I read fiction to be entertained, not to be told how often we are destroying the earth even if it may be true." Other readers, though, have echoed the Romantic Times reviewer who said, “[Freezing Point's] ingenious plot, genuine characters, superlative writing and nail-biting suspense will change the way you look at a bottle of water.”

C.J. believes the six most powerful and irresistible words in the English language are "Let me tell you a story..." When it’s done right, a story can change lives, change opinions – or, at the very least, give the reader something to think about.

How do you feel about fiction with a message?

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Learn more about C.J. Lyons, Beth Groundwater, and Karen Dionne on their websites: http://www.cjlyons.net, http://www.bethgroundwater.com and http://www.karen-dionne.com/.

Mish, Mash, We are Taking a Bath

Sharon Wildwind

For practical purposes, enforcement of copyright law is dead, and artists’ and writers’ incomes are taking a bath because of it.

Governments can’t pass legislation fast enough to keep up with new media platforms. Even if copyright laws were updated weekly, those laws apply only in one country.

Creators can no longer keep track of who has copied or downloaded their material or how it’s being mashed into new material. Only wealthy artists like multi-media collagist Richard Prince and photographer Patrick Cariou can afford to fight out questions of copyright infringement in the courts.

Prince built his entire career around appropriating imagery created by others and using it in art works that sells for millions of dollars. He could do this because of a principle in copyright laws called fair use.

Under fair use anyone had the right to use a small amount of someone else’s creation, add value to the original, and thus enrich society. Not everything was up for grabs. Song lyrics couldn’t be touched, even in minute snippets, but Andy Warhol could take a recognizable can of food and turn it into a cultural icon. Susan Herbert could take a painting (admittedly not under copyright) by Frans Hals and turn it into a very silly cat portrait, which an English factory then turned into thousands of a tin boxes, one of which sits on my desk.

What changed in the recent Prince vs. Cariou case was that the judge essentially narrowed what was acceptable and legal under fair use and found that Mr. Cariou’s interests had been violated by Mr. Prince’s extensive use of Cariou’s photographs. Mr. Prince is appealing the decision, but modern art museums are suddenly very nervous. Many of their holdings are based on material taken from copyrighted sources and manipulated into satires or pastiches.

This may sound selfish, but I want some say so before other writers muck about in a universe that I created. I don’t want them borrowing my characters wholesale and assigning them alternate sexual preferences, political views, or occupations, like vampire hunter. They are the way I created them, and I want them to stay that way.

How you feel about what may happen in the art world, and what already happened in the music, movie, and writing businesses depends, in large part, on when you were born.

If you are a writer who was born before the 1980s, chances are that, at the least, you have qualms about appropriation of creative work. You may go so far as to be angry and confused, and demand that governments pass and enforce iron-clad laws. Good luck on that.

If you were born in or after the 1980s, to use the vernacular, “No worries. It’s all good.” meaning that anything in the public venue is just that, available for any kind of public reuse without limit, and with compensating the original artist/writer.

The argument that is frequently made for mashing-up writing (or art) is that once something is available to the public, it has passed some mythical best-before date. It’s like that almost-suspicious dish of leftovers in the refrigerator, and we really should use it up soon, shouldn’t we? Besides, the author can always write more or an artist paint more. It’s not like this stuff is valuable or anything.

Setting the legal questions aside—remember I started by saying that enforcement of copyright laws was dead—the disregard for copyright speaks to some basic questions about respect: respect for self, respect for others, and personal responsibility for actions.

Have we, as a society, become so creatively bankrupt that thousands of people are so terrified of the blank page that they are reduced to starting their own work with what someone else has done? Can they create only if they can spin off of soup cans, boy wizards, or Victorian detectives? I don’t happen to think so.

One of the things I plan to do this year is take a closer look at Creative Commons. I'm not crazy enough to think that all of my creative work is priceless, and there is some of it that I think might do pretty well in a mash-up. It's just I want a way to say which work that is. At least Creative Commons gives me choices.

You might want to take a look there, too.

Mish, Mash, We are Taking a Bath by Sharon Wildwind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Quote for the week

There is no sense in owning the copyright unless you are going to use it. I don't think anyone wants to hold all of this stuff in a vault and not let anybody have it. It's only worth something once it's popular.

~Hilary Rosen, editor, television columnist, and former executive officer of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Writing Letters: A Goal for 2012

by Julia Buckley

These are some letters I received in the late '80s, two of them from overseas.

In contemplating feasible resolutions for the New Year, I made several mundane but necessary ones: being healthy, losing weight, being more positive, swearing less. But I also wanted to address a problem that I've noted in the past year, when I sit down to write a note to someone in the old-fashioned way: my attention span for writing this type of missive has diminished.

According to this blog, the shrinking attention span affects all ages: "The way society has evolved is equally to blame. The effect of our fascination with the latest electronic gadgetry goes far deeper than we would like to believe. Day in and day out we allow ourselves to be exposed to sound-bite news and event coverage on television. The same goes for the meaningless and plot-less movies being dished out under the guise of public demand. Add to that, the enchantment with cell phones and it is not difficult to understand why the attention spans of adults and children alike are shortening. The obsession with television has reached such proportions that a child's attention span while watching TV is not taken into account while assessing his/her abilities to focus.

The fact is that our capacities to communicate and understand have been seriously hampered. The saddest part of the scenario that is emerging is that we are closing our minds by tuning out our ears and shutting our eyes to information."

Emily Post wrote this of writing letters in 1922. Even in this far-off era, Ms. Post noted that the art of letter writing was "gradually dwindling." Still, she suggested, " . . . people do write letters in this day and there are some who possess the divinely flexible gift for a fresh turn of phrase, for delightful keenness of observation."

What was true in 1922 is true for us today. A "snail mail" letter is still more precious to me than an e-mail, and I have a bag full of some of the most beautiful letters I've received over time (as pictured above). Below, you see part of a six-page letter I received from my older brother when I was in college. Ms. Post would have loved his whimsical and polite style--and look at his lovely handwriting!

Are hand-written letters anachronisms? Perhaps they have become so; but I have used one of my Christmas gifts--an Amazon gift card--to buy a basket full of beautiful stationery, and I intend to write on it. Composing a letter the old-fashioned way might have several benefits:

1) It might renew a friendship that I had allowed to become distant.
2) It might, with practice, allow me to reclaim some of my receding attentiveness to tasks.
3) It might enhance my writing and allow me to get in touch once more with whatever "keenness of observation" I might once have exercised in a multi-page letter.
4) It might make me appreciate that e-mail, Facebook, and other computerized forms of communication, while the most efficient, are not necessarily always the best.

images: 1/1/12 Julia Buckley