writing

Love It And Let It Go

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / Leave a comment

book stackSince holding the first printed copies of my book, Indispensable, in my hand, the idea that it is published has become increasingly real. Surprisingly, it also became temporarily disconcerting.

My first reaction to receiving my book was amusement. It existed in so many electronic versions over time, and the publication process was so long. Suddenly, I thought, all that effort came down to this little book? That’s all? I mean, I liked the cover, but wasn’t it a little thin?

Nonetheless, it was fun to hold and even more enjoyable to see others turn it over in their hands, feel the cover, and casually flip through the pages (like one does with a real book). We chatted about the design, the paper stock, and all the other little superficialities of it.

But then, I saw for the first time in my life, someone actually sit down to read it. She sat across my office just out of shouting distance. This first witnessed reader started by flipping through casually, but then paused as something caught her eye. Oh dear God, I thought, someone is actually reading my book! Instead of feeling excited, I was suddenly horrified. Though I knew it all along, it was as if I didn’t realize until that point: People are actually going to read this thing.

I wanted to sit by her side. I wanted to answer her questions and clear up where things were ambiguous. I wanted to understand her feedback and make changes where things were insufficient. In short, I wanted to have a conversation about the ideas and their evolution.

But that’s not what books are meant to do.

Books put your thoughts out into the world through monologue, not dialogue. There is no back-and-forth. You can’t defend your thinking. You can’t learn from others’ experiences and evolve what you originally wrote.

For so long, the book was a singular manuscript in my hands. I had complete control over it. I could change words, phrases, or sentences. I could rearrange or rewrite entire concepts. The book was mine.

Indispensable_FrontBut now, there are hundreds of published copies owned by others instead of that one manuscript controlled by me. Beyond what I originally put on the page, I have no ability to inform the reader’s experience. Though in retrospect, the release of control happened incrementally through the course of copy edits, proofreads, and publication, it felt to me like it happened all at once.

And so, this is my chance to let go of the book. It’s not mine anymore; it’s yours. My writer friend, Jess, reminded me that this is common in the process of writing — and even explicit in the process of some writers’ groups: you are not allowed to speak about your own piece.

Like so many things in life, I love it and let it go. Thank you all for receiving it.

Meredith


Indispensable: How to Succeed at Your First Job and Beyond is available for purchases here on Amazon.

What I Learned In The Ten Years It Took To Publish My First Book

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / 1 Comment

I wrote my first version of Indispensable nearly ten years ago, over the early part of 2008.  Later that year, as the publishing industry struggled with the birth of eBooks, the economy collapsed, and my life moved forward, the goal of publishing it shifted into the background.  I largely put the manuscript down and didn’t touch it for years.

Now, it’s ten years later and my book is due to be published on June 26th.  The process of resurrecting, revisiting, and revising the book has been insightful.  More than anything else, the manuscript has served as a point of reflection of who I was then and who I am now.  As I set to work on revisions, I found myself having visceral reactions to the content. The tone of some sections made me cringe.  How could I be so rude, so flippant, or so ignorant?  On the other hand, some sections felt like old friends briefly forgotten.  How wise I used to be!  If I had only remembered that advice and applied it myself since writing it!  Over the past decade, I’ve learned and grown.  And the world has evolved around me.  My manuscript – from its previous incarnation and its current revisions – has been a lens through which to see all that change more clearly.

On the whole, I’ve noticed two major dimensions along which I’ve changed the most.  First, my understanding of diversity, inclusion, and privilege has expanded significantly.  In the revisions, I rotate the gender of the managers and employees chapter by chapter.  Similarly, I intentionally included a wide variety of names to be ethnically-inclusive; it’s no longer just a book about Bobs and Rachels.  But, perhaps most notably, I rewrote the entire segment on dressing at work to be comprehensive of a more fluid range of gender expressions – and to acknowledge how precious physical expression can be to people.  The passages that used to read as “just quiet down and wear whatever you need to wear to fit in” have a more nuanced tone, one suggesting that you make a conscious choice about what you wear and own the repercussions of how others may interpret that as reflective of your professional competence.

That brings me to the second shift in my approach; not just in the realm of physical presentation, but more broadly, my overarching approach became much less proscriptive and more fungible. I wrote the initial book as the essential advice you need to succeed in your first job and beyond.  The tone conveyed that this this advice was important and that the reader should carefully listen, learn, and apply each suggestion.  I positioned it as a universal formula for success.  Now, I’ve softened that approach.  I’m wise enough to know that even if some abstracted advice is broadly useful, people and situations are different. I present the book as full of useful strategies, but ones which should be considered, adapted, and applied with judgment. I focus more on the journey, the learning, and the development into your authentic self at work. Ultimately, I put the reader more in the position of power and conscious choice over their path rather than in the position of receiving wisdom from on high.

Now, Indispensable is in the final rounds of copy editing and proofreading.  From a content perspective, this book, which was ten years in the making, is suddenly out of my hands.  And I find myself looking both backwards and forwards.  Looking forward, if I am living well, won’t I learn as much over the next decade as I did over the last?  It is scary to think that the manuscript is fixed and I won’t be able to evolve it over time – as I and the world evolve in parallel. I have to believe that I’ll look back on Indispensable in another ten years and think “Wow, I missed so much.”

And so, I’m publishing something which feels not like a universal decree, but instead, a stake in the ground. But maybe that’s okay.  Maybe, since this version of the book will be fixed, it will provide a similar view into my psychology today – and I’ll be able to see the differences between now and then – and the growth that has occurred – all the more clearly.

Meredith
For more on the book, buy on Amazon.

ten years graphic

The Poetry Flip

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / Leave a comment

the poetry flip graphic 2

It’s rare that I sit down to write and poetry comes out. In many ways, prose is more aligned with the nature of who I am — someone who wants to illuminate a clear path to what is most meaningful. To that end, I mostly find poetry a difficult medium through which to communicate meaning while maintaining clarity.

And yet, from time to time, poetry flows out anyway. It tends happen at times when my feelings on a subject are so strong that the ‘clarity’ possible in prose feels reductive and unsatisfactory. This was the case three weeks ago, when I found myself both mourning the death of a dear friend and impacted by children and teens around the nation marching for their lives. The grief of the funeral as well as the images of children proved to be an overwhelming experience of tragedy and possibility, despair and hope, death and life. I found it hard to not only process, but also to articulate anything without the nuance and shape of poetry. And so, poetry is what came.

The hardest part of writing poetry for me is my inevitable judgment of the output. Unable to judge it versus my typical rubric of meaning and clarity, I often don’t know what good looks like. Today, as I share my poetry with you, I put it into the world lightly — less concerned about the quality of the thing and simply grateful that I can flex into a different form when the necessities of life call for something else. Whatever the form, what matters most is that there is simply a way to share the most important things.

With love and hope,
Meredith


Many Are Here

I. The Way
From the darkness I saw this place inside and out.
I saw all the ways to perform and succeed.
The world, complex but clear,
was peopled by structures and traditions,
roles and expectations,
cues, routines, rewards.
This was the way.

II. The Invitation
Slowly, the crack.
First one jumped, and then two more, and now dozens at a time,
as if jumping for their lives from two towers high above.
Falling men. Falling women.
Cashing in on an invitation that,
if brave and foolish enough,
they might be able to create
out of the deepest and truest inclination of their souls.
We thought they were silly; we knew they were right.

These were the first holes in the firmament,
water drip-dropping through them.
If you didn’t know better, you’d say:
“A leaky faucet, call the plumber.”

III. The Exhortation
Exiled and out of the parklands, now
invitation becomes exhortation.
Postdiluvian but preapocalyptic.
And no one is left behind.

And so, a new creed in our crisis,
one unhinged from books but floating in the ether,
in bits and bytes around us,
and prophesied by the voices of little children
wiser and braver than you.
If you open your ears, you too can make out the words,
echoing the call of a civil rights anthem:

 We must and we must now
abandon sins of commission, and
walk to truth and reconciliation.
Radical accountability is the higher call.
What have you used? Who have you used?
And where did you discard them?

 We must and we must now
throw out our lawn signs and let the grass breathe.
Instead of arguing the point of the point, we must
strengthen ourselves to be wildly wrong.
When we find we are not only victim, but perpetrator,
we cannot be surprised.
It was us all along.

 We must and we must now.
Not create from what we know first,
and not birth from self,
but unearth what lies
beyond the me, beyond the I, beyond the mine.
We must recover the better instincts of our souls
and become brave on their behalf.

IV. The Giant
There is no other option;
you already knew there was no white knight at the gates.
But there is a giant with a flaming cloak,
a gentle shepherd to help find the other side of this,
allowing you to do something right
without letting it go to your head.
In his fire you are incinerated and embraced.
That is the start.

Many are here, I am here.
And soon, you must be here.

So That Happened

/ Meredith Whipple Callahan / 2 Comments

As many of you know, I spent the last three weeks getting married to Liz, celebrating with friends and family, and running off to Bora Bora on my honeymoon. I can think of few other periods in my life as dense with experience, emotion, and meaning as these. Typically, when life feels full like this, I depend upon writing. Through writing, I process emotions, document events, and envision the future. However, uncharacteristically, I feel blocked from writing about the past few weeks. I’ve opened and closed my journal a dozen times. I’ve beat myself up about not writing. I’ve avoided it entirely. And yet, when it’s hard to begin processing, I suppose you have to start somewhere:

ceremony

Wedding week kicked off with dinner at French Laundry, the obligatory City Hall visit, beers and tacos on the waterfront, wine tasting in Sonoma, sitting around the Inn fire pit, open mic toasts at the rehearsal, and thirty people who rarely ride bikes pedaling over the Golden Gate Bridge. There was the ceremony we wrote ourselves, Reese’s best behavior as he came up the aisle, the reflections of our officiants, the surprise first dance starring our fathers, and the encouragement to “Live Long and Prosper.” There was the mist in the Presidio, the clear view of the Golden Gate, the sanctity of the space, the smell of eucalyptus, and the mountains of petits fours. There were bottles of champagne sabered by knives (more or less successfully), family-style platters passed around the table, a chance to wear my mother’s veil, a second wedding dress, and abounding grilled cheese. There was biking the approach to Sausalito with my uncle, calculating last-minute vendor tips with my bridesmaid Eleanore, the dance with my dad, and the last picture of the night with my mom. There was the note Liz sent me our wedding morning, my gasp at first seeing her, and walking Reese together under the full moon after the whole reception finished. And all this was before the honeymoon. It was before bottles of champagne on arrival, tropical flowers from my wife surprising me in our room, and fresh coconuts opened by the gardener. It was before Liz tackled the trails on our ATV, we choreographed team jumps off our overwater bungalow, and I fell face-first off a stand-up paddleboard. In each of these experiences, there were dense emotions as well: the joy of seeing friends and family, the pressure of coordination, the annoyance of detail-orientation, the hope that all would go well, the confidence that this was so right, the overwhelming love of everyone in attendance, and the gratitude for everyone and for each other. Coming out of these few weeks, there’s a distinct happy/sad feeling, just like the happy/sad tears I cried at the toasts, on the dance floor, and when the wedding was all thankfully, impossibly, heart-breakingly over.

Why is it so hard to write about the wedding? First, it’s too big, too dense, and too meaningful. I find it impossible to select a vignette that’s representative of the whole or condense the entirety down into something comprehensive. Thus, instead of presenting a thoughtful deconstruction of a focused experience (as is often my approach on The Intentional), I can only come up with the incomplete litany of impressions above.

Second, it’s hard to reflect upon the wedding/honeymoon period because it’s not yet over; we’re still in the ‘liminal’ period. Liminality is a concept in anthropology and ritual studies; it describes the disorienting in-between-ness that happens after you leave one role (e.g., engaged person) and before you take on your new role (e.g., married person). You’re no longer this, but not yet that. Because we start back to work tomorrow, Liz and I have not yet re-emerged into the world as married folk. Life is still filled with wedding logistics, honeymoon-worthy candlelit dinners, and a distinct separation from everyday life. Perhaps, in addition to the sheer volume of experiences, I’m also struggling with reflecting upon this experience as I’m still in the midst of it.

Looking forward, I suspect it will take time to integrate the events of the last few weeks; as days and weeks pass, I’ll be better able to digest the great volume of experiences and benefit from the perspective of being back in the flow of life. Self-growth often takes conscious processing, and there are certainly more wedding posts to come. What form my continued reflection takes, there’s also a refreshing finality in closing this in-between period. It means that, on the most important level, the change is complete. I re-enter the world tomorrow fundamentally and delightfully different from who I’ve been: I’m now married to Liz.

With love to all those who read this, all those who celebrated with us, and, above all, my lovely wife,
Meredith Whipple Callahan

(More to come!)

first dance