Writing Features
Personal Writing
Wright Brothers 2019
The Wright Brothers' Memorial is a stone monolith that splits the sky at the far end of a vast plain. Close-cut grass, choked with sand, lies on its side as if trampled and sprawls for hundreds of meters in each direction. Visitors follow a generous path, better suited to an 18-wheeler than foot traffic, with instructions uncomplicated and implied: approach, linger politely, and then depart. Travelers to the Outer Banks, the thin string of barrier islands off the northeast coast of North Carolina, often visit this site after one too many lazy days at the beach, simultaneously digesting the day’s fresh catch. They pay their respects to the first tarmac.
The Wrights, lifelong Ohio natives, identified the sloping, gusty dunes of Kitty Hawk as the ideal testing ground for their attempts at machine powered flight: a hobby which their careers as mechanics prepared them for quite well. They flew on December 17th, 1903. The black and white photographs of the exhibit, the film appropriately flecked with imperfections, show two suited men in tall, round hats seated within a contraption vaguely reminiscent of a backyard swing in the wreckage of a demolition.
The site of the first flight is now pleasantly grass-coated and useless, simple and alluring: an ancient mound site topped by a tower with the asymmetric precision of a machine. The natural conditions, isolation among them, which once made the land so desirable, are entirely obsolete in the unstoppable wake of automated air travel. My grandmother remembers when her great uncle’s patrol station was the only structure on the beach as far as the eye could see. A multigenerational resident of the region, she made sure every whisper of local lore comprised my panoply of history. We walked to sites of local murder mysteries in her neighborhood, pointed from the road at a house which once sat above pirate tunnels, and drove far out of town to the former site of the world’s largest wooden blimp hangar (now burned to the ground). All sites of legend, with profoundly mundane appearances, which upon visitation allow the sacredness of a greater time to creep into the imagination.
The Wright Brothers undeniably represent some component of local pride and importance, with reminders of the day on license plates, state quarter designs, and driver’s licenses (as a child, I attended the centennial of the first flight in 2003, clinging to my grandmother, writing in my notebook only of the terrible winter rain), lauding the moment in 1903 in which a few Ohioans set up shop for a moment before returning home. My grandmother feels such love for her home, for the flight which first occurred there. What of the North Carolinians, who honor the achievements of people from far away, and how the land was used and left behind? A reverence for the land’s momentary usefulness and the achievement of flight: a maneuver which has carried myself and every one of my grandmother’s grandchildren to reside in cities far out of state. A century later, the airplane exhaust dulls the sun and rising seas devour the coast line. At its most narrow, the Outer Banks is only 150 meters.
Outer Banks, NC 2022
Outer Banks 2020
Local crews excavate offshore shoals and dump the sand on the island chain’s eroding shorelines in 80-foot heaps. Sand where my grandmother played, sand that’s clinging, crystallized, to my wet hair. It was her great uncle’s patrol station: a humble place where you could poke a slim finger through the knotted floorboards and point at the sand below. Now choked for open space, the cottage was once the only structure on the beach.
Hear the tides creep up the shore when the heat keeps you awake, hear the thunderous waves: irregular and continuous. You will feel every grain of sand in your sheets. Every surface in the house swells with the Atlantic, never further than 200 yards. Patches of the floor are covered in plywood, perpetually sand strewn. The kitchen linoleum warps from aquatic peeling. The sea is coming to collect.
Local crews excavate offshore shoals and dump the sand on the island chain’s eroding shorelines in 80-foot heaps. Sand where my grandmother played, sand that’s clinging, crystallized, to my wet hair. It was her great uncle’s patrol station: a humble place where you could poke a slim finger through the knotted floorboards and point at the sand below. Now choked for open space, the cottage was once the only structure on the beach. The sea is coming to collect. A landscape of memory, folklore, and ecological precarity surrounds North Carolina’s barrier island chain called the Outer Banks. They are legends of invasion, exploitation, and extraction. Land use and misuse: collisions of ecological relationships within the anthropocene on such a narrow stretch of beach. Dead sailors, dead pirates, dead nags: their neck-adorned lanterns ignited in a lighthouse imitation that doomed sailors in the dark reefs. Their ships disintegrate in shallow sand. The monument to the Wright Brothers’ first flight towers above the island chain with monolithic severity. My Great Aunt’s Ocracoke Brogue will vanish entirely in two generations.
Outer Banks, NC 2022
Book Reviews
BRIEF REVIEWS / TEASERS
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The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. (Philosophical Fiction)
In Rand’s popular and enduring novel, the reader follows unwavering architect Howard Roark as he pursues his passion for creating modernist buildings. Howard’s vision is startling and inflammatory: focusing on materials and forms rather than the traditional expectations of the architectural field. The young architect refuses to compromise, collaborate, nor change his designs for any price. While Howard's singular, groundbreaking creative vision is the work of an Artist (capital A), the legacy of this deeply philosophical book has come to inspire architects of a new kind: those of an elite class that glorifies selfish individualism, unconcerned with those caught in their wake. A favorite of Trump-era politicians and tech bros alike, featuring glimpses of sexual violence and convictions of pervasive deception within journalistic bodies, it's no wonder narcissistic personalities dominating today’s media circuit find the book inspiring and instructive.
The Last Dinosaur Book by WJT Mitchell. (Nonfiction/Iconology)
Why do dinosaurs persist in pop culture? Why do they turn up as the friendly (yet widely despised?) character Barney, or in Spielberg’s dino-thriller, or in everyday conversations when you’re talking about someone slow, old, and outdated? The malleable creature has even served as a political tool of US presidents to showcase American power (The White House once had a fossil room!), a gender reinforcing tool, a symbol of colonialism/oil industry power, and so much more. Iconologist WJT Mitchell collects and considers how the dinosaur has existed as a cultural symbol, and how it has been appropriated and employed by humans during the ~200 years since the first scientific discovery of dinosaur bones. Definitely one of my favorite reads of the year— if reading a massive picture book counts! (It does.)
Shock Value by John Waters (Memoir)
Outrageous filmmaker John Waters’ memoir “Shock Value” outlines his rebellious and resourceful early life and film career. With a filmmaking style that is hilariously self aware and intentionally in bad taste, cult classic films like Pink Flamingos subverted any and all expectations of a popular film: his cast was comprised of all non-actor friends, sets were unadorned glimpses of their own homes, and props were made of whatever they could find (sometimes even trash). Waters’ memoir proves to be as hilarious and intriguing as his movies, with my personal favorite moment involving Waters and friends ditching school, heading to NYC, and piercing each others ears on the bus simply to freak out fellow passengers. Genius.
EXCERPTS FROM LONGER BOOK REPORTS
From University of Southern California Assignments
All the Agents and The Saints: Dispatches from the US Borderlands, Stephanie Griest (Travel/Journalism)
(excerpt) Marked by division, the communities on the borderland not only find separations between themselves as natives and the non-natives, but amongst themselves: with identifying differences ranging from vast societal aspirations, to the spectrum of opinions on the local casino. Interpersonal decisions could result in community wide demarcations, with a marriage to a non-native resulting in tribal illegitimacy for one’s biracial children. Genetic quantification as a legally enforced means of tribal belonging essentially isolates these people from both realms, condemning them to a permanent borderlands. Griest feels a special connection to these children of the borderlands, who are denied a part of their ancestral and interpersonal history if permanently denied from their parent’s tribe. Griest is familiar with this biracial conflict, which she mentions throughout the book as she explores her own personal history, and finds that these same issues trouble many who identify as biracial. She once “interviewed fifty biracial people for a book project about mixed identity. Every single one of us struggles over existential isolation but we’re so guilt ridden that we could hardly admit it.”
The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells (Science Fiction)
(excerpt) Towards the end of the narrative, both Prendick and Moreau harbor distasteful opinions of one another. Both recognize that they cannot express concern for beings who demand respect for hierarchies of being which are different from their own. Once Moreau is dead and gone and Prendick watches the animals, in his isolation he struggles to understand Moreau and his motivations. Prendick analyses that “his curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on,” rather than any commendable purpose, which conditionally excuses animal cruelty in typical ethical scenarios (Wells). In his incapability of understanding Moreau’s purpose: the way he senselessly practiced cruelty unto animals, Prendick realizes that he is unable to care for Moreau at all, even after his death. Prendick attributes his inability to care to the fact that Moreau’s work was not grounded, that perhaps “had Moreau any intelligible object, [Prendick] could have sympathized at least a little with him” (Wells). In removing himself from a hierarchy of concern for fellow beings, Moreau distinguished himself from the beings who deserve consideration and care, those which the moral codes of being strive to protect. Yet because Moreau did not act within Prendick’s code of understanding the world sympathetically, he was unable to show concern for him. Both of their stances on sympathy confirm the notion that that beings which exist outside of one’s own hierarchy of being are not deserving of concern.
NONFICTION BOOK SUMMARIES
BOOK SUMMARIES FOR PMA CONSULTING BLOG
Never Eat Alone - Keith Ferrazzi
Keith Ferrazzi’s “Never Eat Alone” offers practical tips on professional success through effective networking. For some, the term “networking” conjures dreaded images of awkward small talk and the dispersal of business cards. For Ferrazzi, to network is a way of life: to seek friends and professional advancement by finding opportunities for giving, not just receiving.
Three takeaways:
Develop yourself
Determine your “Personal Branding Message,” an honest and distinct presentation of who you are and what you want. To develop your mission you should identify your strengths, weaknesses, passions and goals, and always tell people how you can help them rather than simply seeking from them. Prove yourself to be a valuable resource to others, both by accumulating knowledge and skills, as well as by cultivating relationships with others.
Consider strategic network figures
Ferrazzi emphasizes the usefulness of a “Relationship action plan,” a brief form of networking goal setting.
Identify your goals
Identify people who could help you with goals
Determine methods of contact
Ferrazzi advises on maximizing conference strategy: effectively researching and meeting important attendees, working behind the scenes, giving a speech, or hosting an event yourself.
Maintain valuable friendships
Ferrazzi emphasizes the ways in which you must be willing to help your friends out. Letting your circles mingle with each other, by hosting events or gatherings, can help you better get to know people in a relaxed setting and help your friends network with one another. Having interest in the personal lives of others and being transparent about who you are is the key to building relaxed, real friendships. Accumulating friends means that you can cultivate a personal board of advisors, a group of valuable, trusted friends who are eager to offer career help and life advice.
Ferrazzi teaches that offering generosity, knowing your contacts as best as possible, and treating others with genuine friendship proves to be the most successful recipe not only for successful networking, but for a successful and meaningful way of life.
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Inspired by Carl Jung’s isolated and incredibly productive Swiss retreats, Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” emphasizes the importance of performing focused and effortful tasks for extended periods of time, all the while avoiding hindrances and distractions. The book serves as both an argument for making focused, intentional, and undistracted effort (which he coins “deep work”), and as an instruction manual for incorporating helpful techniques into one’s daily life. Newport outlines the ways to avoid “shallow” work in one’s professional life, specifically explaining the ways in which multitasking and distraction are exacerbated by technological advances.
Three takeaways:
Schedule Deep Work
There are many methods through which one can practice deep work in their daily lives. The forms outlined by Newport range from monastic (a lifestyle of almost entirely isolated and mentally committed work), to bimodal (occasionally partaking in isolated deep work sessions like Jung’s retreats), to ritualistic (designating daily chunks of one’s day specifically for deep work). Newport suggests that experimentation should help people determine which option works best for them, finding that these deep work modes prove successful for very different lifestyles.
Wane yourself OFF of shallow lifestyle
Newport suggests “batching” one’s necessary but menial tasks into specific blocks of time and devoting others specifically to deep work, never allowing oneself to submit to the inherently addictive nature of sporadic digital communications. While Newport admits that some individuals quit social media cold turkey, he understands that for many this sort of digital isolation proves to be unrealistic. He suggests that instead, one should intentionally schedule internet time/breaks, delete unnecessary distractions, and generally avoid at all other times.
Value your time off
Just as menial tasks should be scheduled, leisure time should also be scheduled and strictly upheld. Allowing oneself to be content with boredom and available to really shut down and relax after work to avoid addiction to distraction and make the most of one’s personal life (no checking emails!). Newport references the ways in which the human mind is limited: willpower eventually runs out and even the most advanced practitioners generally can’t exceed 4 hours of continuous work. Strategy is vital for designing deep work time.
The key component of “deep work” is to avoid all forms of distraction to reach a more advanced state of thinking and productivity, and to do so requires intentional scheduling. Newport’s method suggests that in order to best enjoy your personal time and do your most profound thinking, you must strictly separate these realms of your life and abstain from multitasking in all of its forms.
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Charlotte StrEATs Festival:
Family Night
for Charlotte is Creative, 2022
We had an amazing time last night at Charlotte StrEATs Festival Family Night, with vendors from around Charlotte and impressive demonstrations from kids who love to cook. There were appearances from Charlotte’s playful trio of mascots, balloon light sabers and bumblebees, and families young and old enjoying the last bite of a sprinkled ice cream pop or a tropical shaved ice. …Or maybe both!
Be sure to stick around for today’s CLT StrEATs Festival event for tastings, cocktails, and demonstrations from dozens of the local restaurants you love and others you've been hoping to try!
Charlotte StrEATs Festival:
Tasting
for Charlotte is Creative, 2022
Charlotte StrEATs Festival’s Main Tasting Event was a hit last weekend, offering foodies a chance to sample dishes from a fabulous selection of local restaurants. Vendors offered attendees a variety of cuisines, with samplings of southern classics, international favorites, and creative fusion dishes from around the city.
Each chef manned a color-coordinated tent indicating the neighborhood in which their restaurant is located, giving a true tour of Charlotte's eclectic and thriving restaurant scene.
