We’re getting ready to hit the publish button on this month’s issue of The BeZine in a few hours. The theme this month is Environment/Environmental Justice. Here, our friend Judith Black helps us to warm up with her TED-X video on StoryTelling and Climate Change organized by the storytelling community.
JUDITH BLACK (Storytelling: A Window on to the World A Mirror into the Heart) is a professional storyteller, story maker, and teacher/coach with an international following. Originally trained at Wheelock College as an early childhood educator, Judith leapt from the classroom to the stage after training at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Ultimately she bound these two passions with storytelling and for thirty-five years has been using story to motivate, humanize, entertain, and teach. She is the winner of many awards in her field.
If you are reading this in an email, you’ll likely need to link through to view the video.
Some days I get caught between my inability to spell a word and the artistic desire to use just the right one. There’s a temptation to take the lazy way out, to substitute the easy word for the perfect one. My spelling is so bad that I got Ds and Fs on tests in elementary school. I was always the first one to get booted out of the spelling bee.
Later in life, when my son got home from school, I would hand him a manuscript and pay him a quarter for every misspelling he found. Now I just text him. Generally I can’t come close enough to the right spelling … if I could the spell-check might work for me … so I just make like a crossword puzzle:
“Son, Homer between a rock and hard place … ?”
“Mom, Scylla and Charybdis.”
“Son, it begins with an ‘a’ and is foolish.”
“Mom, absurd…!!!!”
Even though I’m a slow reader and a poor speller, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t write for a living, probably because I wasn’t diagnosed with dyslexia until I was almost fifty. (Story for another day.) I had no name to give this puzzling situation. In retrospect, that might be a good thing.
For years I thought my problem was my Brooklynese, my pronunciation. On and off over time I read books and listened to tapes on elocution, which did seem to help a bit. Then Laurel D. sent us this Funny or Die video, The Bensonhurst Spelling Bee. It’s a chuckle-and-a-half and has nothing to do with dyslexia, but in an odd way it sort-of validates my hypothesis. Pronunciation may not be the root of the challenge, but it probably does help to complicate things.
If you’re reading in email, you’ll likely have to click through to this site to view the video. (If you’re also from Brooklyn, it’s a must see.)
Humor aside, dyslexia shouldn’t stop anyone from being a writer. It’s not a reason to give up on writing or to encourage your children to do so.HERE is a list of twenty-five well-known writers who are or were dyslexic. The late Stephen Cannell was famously dyslexic. He was open about it in an effort to help and encourage others. The Learning Center section of his website provides some background and tips.
It is estimated that 15-17% of the population is dyslexic.
Way back when, one of my main motivations for ditching my flip phone and getting a smart phone (best thing I ever did) was the camera. As much as anything, I got my iPhone 5c to take, edit and manipulate photos. I wanted to be able to illustrate poems and other works.
I’ve also had some ideas for videos I’d like to make and the video below is my first experiment. I used Animoto, a cloud-based service founded in 2006 according to Wikipedia. Honestly, it was just the first service that came up when I started my search. No analysis went into the selection. I didn’t comparison shop. Since I’ve never done this before, I can’t tell you how easy or not Animoto is to use relative to other tools. The video is not exactly what I envisioned, but the problem is mine, not Animoto. After awhile I just got tired of fussing over which photos, what order and what music.
I found Animoto easy – intuitive, as they say – to use and affordable, though that’s a relative thing. The videos are loaded into a WordPress post the same way you’d load a YouTube video – by using the URL. Easy.
You can log into Animoto and play around without making any committment to buy, so if it’s something you want to try too – GO FOR IT. The site offers direction, information on copyright, a limited selection of music and even stock photographs if you don’t have your own. Not bad. $8 a month if you pay for an entire year. Otherwise it’s $16 a month. That’s just the basic package. There are two other options.
If you are viewing this from email, it’s likely you’ll have to link through to watch the video.
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Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), American Fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery author, perhaps best known for the dystopian Fahrenheit 451.
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Thoughts of Ray Bradbury can’t help but make us smile. They bring with them memories of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, editor John Wood Campbell (Astounding Science Fiction, Analog Science and Fact, Amazing) and pulp magazines with their staple writers (Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke… and others) who thrilled us with fringe politics, pseudo science and controversy. We don’t think of them as poets, but apparently at least one dabbled in the art.
I post this once every two years. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
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Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 