The Rose and the Thorn

In January of this year I had a delightful experience participating in the Gateways podcast, by Otherworld Theatre Company. Otherworld Theatre produces original speculative fiction and for their Gateways series, writers are given a prompt and must create a short story in five days to be read in front of a live audience. I really enjoyed the adrenaline challenge of writing a piece so quickly, there’s something freeing about doing something short on a short deadline rather than a long piece over a long period of time. It’s like doing a sprint or a quick sketch over a marathon or a mural. My piece, “Indirect Transmission” was performed by the talented Rob and Molly Southgate. Here’s a link to the performance. If you are in Chicago and enjoy speculative fiction and live theatre, I highly recommend checking out Otherworld Theatre.

Hang in there, friends! We are almost through February!

This month I published an article with the South Side Weekly on a new community health clinic in Chicago. I’ve been a fan of the South Side Weekly for many years and I’m excited to be a contributor.

While researching and writing this article, I used several of the journalism resources offered by Solutions Journalism Network. The network trains journalists to cover how people are responding to problems, in addition to covering the problem itself. The goal isn’t to provide “feel-good” material, but to responsibly and accurately report the many ways people and institutions are trying to solve problems—successful or not. If you write about responses to problems, whether as a journalist, analyst, etc. I recommend their training materials.

My birthday is on November 22,  which means it falls on Thanksgiving about every six or seven years, including this year.  I had mixed feelings about this birthday–it’s been a rough few months for my physical and mental health so I wasn’t feeling particularly celebratory.  But the funny thing about birthdays is that they come and go no matter how you feel about them and your life is politely waiting for you on the other side, like a dog that needs to be walked.

I hosted Thanksgiving and tried to be the hostess that I want to see in the world, so there was a lot of starchy food and cheese and alcohol and I didn’t make anyone say what they were thankful for this year.  I am thankful for quite a few things though, even if I didn’t say it aloud.

I’m so grateful for stories and for the people who tell them.  I’ve had difficulty accessing joy during the past few months and consuming stories has been one of the few consistent ways I can feel a sense of joy and hope.  I finally got into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (I tried a few times before and made the mistake of starting at the beginning) and his books have been the perfect combination of escape and grounding.  In addition to Sir Terry, I found a few television shows, podcasts, and other media that have been deeply comforting and meaningful.

I’m also grateful for people who tell stories with me.  Telling stories is one of the ways I connect with others, whether it’s a formal writing workshop or a long rambling conversation with my husband about how we’d fix a movie we almost liked.  Good collective storytelling is such a vulnerable act–if you are going to be really creative, you have to let people into your weird mind at least a little bit.  My favorite part of this Thanksgiving was sitting around my living room with friends and riffing off a set of jokes until we had a full-blown ridiculous narrative that we created just for ourselves.

Things are been slowly improving (she says cautiously) but this experience reminds me why it is so important to tell your stories, whatever form that takes.  Someone might really need them.

Halloween is my favorite holiday.  Costumes!  Spooky stuff!  Leaves crunching under your feet!  Syncretism!  Candy!

In honor of Halloween, the Illinois association of fundraising researchers asked for fundraising themed spooky short stories to run in their newsletter.   My co-worker and I co-wrote a piece that is an homage to a certain classic vampire novel…you can read our story here.

While writing the story, I re-read said vampire novel and I’ve decided that one of the under-appreciated messages of  Dracula is that it sucks to be the new guy at work.  Why is Jonathan Harker traveling to handle a real estate deal with a reclusive aristocrat in the Carpathian mountains?  Because no one else wanted to do it.    I feel like poor Jonathan Harker often gets the short shrift in film versions–he’s portrayed as naive and stupid, but really, he’s just a brand new graduate at his first law job who gets sent on a crappy assignment and is completely in over his head.  Quincey Morris would have tried to shoot his way out of Dracula’s castle, Dr. Seward would try to science his way out (yes, we are going to pretend that science is also a verb, just move along), Van Helsing knows what’s up and would just stake Dracula on the first night, and Arthur Holmwood wouldn’t be in the situation at all because he’s rich and doesn’t need to work.  Jonathan Harker just wants to do a good job and winds up on the worst business trip ever.

Oh Jonathan, you never stood a chance… [Image Description: Jonathan Harker looks fearful as Count Dracula, wearing a flowing red robe, menaces him from behind]

If you want to revisit some classic horror this Halloween, I recommend Extraordinary Tales.  It is an animated anthology of Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories, each animated by a different artist and read by a different narrator.  The narrators are fantastic and the animation is wonderfully macabre in different ways.  It is currently available on Netflix.

Happy October everyone!

Happy fall to all those in the Northern Hemisphere!  This week I pulled out my scarves and boots, started dousing myself (more) in spicy scents, and am trying desperately to resist buying every  Halloween item in the stores.

I recently went on a lecture and tour titled “Grave Robbing 101,” led by author, podcaster, and Atlas Obscura field agent, Adam Selzer.  Adam’s work focuses on weird and eerie history; for “Grave Robbing 101” he led us on a tour of Lincoln Park, a former cemetery, and discussed the history of graverobbing in Chicago during the 19th century.  The tour was fascinating and I spent a lot of it scribbling down story seeds in my notebook.

Writers get asked a lot where they get their ideas–for me, the two richest veins for ideas are real history and live performances (including theatre, music, and live lit).  History provides such great examples of human relationships, desires, and interactions that it’s hard for me to walk away from a history book or documentary without inklings of stories.  History feels like DNA strands for characters–not just for historical fiction, but any story about people.

I’m less certain why live performances inspire me.  My theory is that it stimulates the “flow” state in me.  Flow state is defined as the mental state of being completely present and fully immersed in a task and has been linked to creativity.  In fact, Teresa Amabile, a research psychologist at Harvard University, found evidence that not only are people more creative in flow, they also report being more creative the day after a flow state.  When I watch a performance, I’m completely immersed the experience and I find myself having story ideas connected to the performance for days afterwards.

And with that, I am going write some more about human shenanigans and gaze longingly at black glitter candelabras.  Here’s to a fabulous fall, full of spooky fun and lots of ideas!

This month I attended the Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference which ran August 9-11 at the downtown Chicago campus.   The conference is a mix of sessions and panels on writing craft and the writing business, primarily geared towards fiction and creative non-fiction writers as well as poets.  Here are some of my takeaways from the…

As I mentioned May’s blog post, I’ve been learning to adjust my writing work style from what I  call “Angry Goat Headbutts Rock In Between It and Lovely Grass” to “Slightly Wiser Goat Looks Around Curiously to See if There is An Alternate Way to Get to Grass.”  The goat is me and the grass…

Happy summer everyone!  I’ve been writing a lot of historical fiction recently and there are certain language issues that are unique to the genre. Here are three problems I’ve wrestled with over the past few years and some of the ways I approach them. Language that is Period-Appropriate, but Sounds Anachronistic: Last year I wrote…

I often refer to writing as my asshole best friend.  It never leaves me (it may be dormant, but it never actually leaves) and it will always tell me the truth, even when–especially when–I don’t want to hear it.  Am I overscheduled?  Overanxious? Overcontrolling?  Not getting enough sleep or food?  Those conditions show up as blocks in my writing process which forces me to address them or at the very least, acknowledge what’s going on.  Natalie Goldberg* said, “To write is to ultimately deal with your whole life,” which I find to be infuriatingly true.

Today I finished a story that pushed me to confront one of my beloved myths: the cure for every problem in my life is to work harder.  God, how I love that myth.  It means that everything a) can be fixed and b) if it isn’t fixed, it’s because  I’m just not working hard enough.  If a friend told me that they were struggling I wouldn’t reflexively say, “Just work harder!”  but I tell myself that a lot.

[Image description: Kermit the Frog typing desperately]

I’ve been bumping up hard against this myth in my life and in my writing during the past few years.  In the case of this story, I found it more and more difficult to work on the piece and I didn’t know why.  I was excited about the first draft and my beta readers got what I was trying to express and gave productive feedback for improving the story.  But as I edited the piece I started to feel worse and worse until I was dreading working on it. I told myself that this was just a case of losing new story energy and reminded myself that new story energy, like new relationship energy, is lovely but not very reliable for a long-haul journey.

I tried doubling down and working through the dread.  I set writing dates up with friends, set weekly goals for editing, and showed up at the page.   But working harder didn’t work.  I tried taking a break then attacking it again, but that didn’t work either, the dread just got worse. I felt so frustrated and afraid–if working harder wasn’t helping, what could help?

On the recommendation of a friend,  I started reading the book Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland.  A line from Chapter 3 stuck to me.

The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work.  To see them, you need only look at the work clearly-without judgement, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes.  Without emotional expectations.  Ask your work what it needs, not what you need.  Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child.

After another frustrating and painful session with the piece, I tried something entirely new.  I asked myself, without judgment, without emotional expectations, What feels so bad about this?  The answer came immediately: I feel like I’m losing the soul of the story.  This doesn’t feel like my story anymore.  And that hurts.

Inquiring after the pain and listening rather than trying to muscle through the pain opened up a new path for my work.  I started a another draft with the goal trying to recapture the feeling of my original draft.   I didn’t throw out the workshop comments but I tried to lean into what made my story unique and excited when I first wrote it.

I’m not sure if I hit the mark, but the dread dissipated and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that dissipating dread is probably a good thing.  Once again, my asshole best friend was willing to tell me the truth but I had to ask and actually listen like the good friend I want to be.

*I’m pretty sure it was Natalie Goldberg.  I searched for the origin of this quote and I haven’t found it yet.  If anyone knows the origin, please tell me!

Hello dear readers,

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been absent from social media and this website since summer 2017. There are two primary reasons for this:

Refocused time:  My organization is in the last phase of our fundraising campaign, which has meant that our prospect research shop is really cooking with gas, as old-timey jazz musicians used to say.  In addition, I got a promotion (hooray!) and have been taking on more responsibilities in internal communications and research ethics–including working on GDPR compliance.   We’ve also been short-staffed until recently when we brought on three fantastic researchers to our team.  These are all exciting things, but it has meant that I’ve needed to focus my energy on my job at the University of Chicago and my daily work (such as internal policymaking/ethics/communication issues) has involved internal confidential information that would not be appropriate for me to discuss publicly (but I hope to present some case studies in the future!).

Widened audience:  I’ve had several new publications and public speaking opportunities in 2017, which is also exciting–but it means that having both my creative writing life and my prospect research life on the same web and social media platform is starting to not make sense anymore.  It’s been difficult to balance the two, so I took some time to think about next steps.

Which brings me to…next steps!

Hooray splits!

I’ve decided to split off my prospect research content into a new website.  Going forward, my author’s website will be www.ameliaaldred.com and the posts will focus on storytelling, upcoming appearances, and publications.  My prospect research website will be www.thephilanthropologist.com and the monthly posts will focus especially on culture and philanthropy and include guest contributors. On the same note, on Twitter @ameliaaldred will be devoted to creative writing content (and other media shouting) while my new account  @AnthroPhil will be devoted to prospect research content. The list of prospect research resources on ameliaaldred.com has been migrated (and updated!) to thephilanthropologist.com.  Fellow nonprofit professionals can check out the first blog post now!

I’ve enjoyed interacting with all of you at readings, conferences, and online and I’m excited about these new ways of connecting with folks.

Best wishes, Amelia

I recently wrote “The Art of the Interview“,  a guide to doing one-on-one interviews with industry insiders as a prospect researcher.  The article is live  on Connections and is accessible to APRA members.

I decided to write the article as a methodology guide, rather than a case study, based on conversations I’ve had with other prospect researchers about the direction of our field.  Many researchers are curious about the direction our field will take in the age of dating mining and aggregation, and artificial intelligence and are concerned that these tools will replace human prospect researchers at nonprofits.  These concerns are valid; I don’t think that human researchers will be be made irrelevant, but I do think our role will shift.  In fact,  the requests and tasks being fulfilled by researcher right now (per my conversations with colleagues) demonstrates that our role is already shifting.

Prospect researchers are shifting from being  primarily data collectors, to data curators as more and more information is available through sophisticated data-mining and aggregation tools, .  In addition, the focus of prospect researchers’ data collection is shifting from straightforward biographical and financial information (addresses, recent donations, estimated compensation etc.) to contextual data; for example, the giving culture of particular industries, the ways social identities influence philanthropic decision-making, and how our supporters view the connection between their donation and our impact.

The shift in prospect research is similar to the shift that occurred in library and information science over the past three decades.  My husband is a librarian and when people find out what he does for a living they frequently comment, “Now that we have Google, aren’t librarians irrelevant?”  My husband explains (with the infinite patience that good librarians and teachers possess and I do not) that he loves search engines and they are incredible tools, but a search engine can’t teach students data literacy, it can’t build a collection based on changing needs of a community, it can’t help you develop a research question, and it definitely won’t connect you to other search engines who are better experts on a specific topic.

Similarly, while data aggregators are fantastic tools, they can’t conduct focus groups with donors, they can’t use qualitative data to construct a good text-mining project, they can’t translate data into fundraising strategy that fits the mission and culture of an organization, and they certainly won’t consider the ethics of how information is shared and stored.

So now that we have Google are prospect researchers irrelevant?  That depends on the kind

Hopefully, the future of prospect research also includes more exciting hats…

of research we are doing and services we provide to our nonprofit colleagues.  It also depends on whether or not our fundraising partners see the benefits of contextual research and information curation; in my experience, most nonprofit professionals are hungry for both of those services. The most frequent question I get from front line fundraisers about data is , “What does this mean?” and “How can I use this to make decisions?” Like modern librarians, these are questions we are ideally positioned to answer and they are the kind of questions that drew us to prospect research in the first place.

I’d love to continue this conversation with other researchers, feel free to tweet your thoughts, or reach out via email!