Friday Feature: @JTRedwood
Dear Readers, Scribblers, Scribes, and Wordsmiths:
This week’s featured Proser is a musician, poet, and native of north-suburban Chicago, Illinois. He was gracious enough to give us an interview recently, which you’ll find transcribed below.
Who is @JTRedwood? What does he do?
Read on to find out...
“[My occupation has] been ever-changing throughout my life. I started out doing computer aided drafting and design. From there I got into the strange world of architectural terracotta masonry and helped restore old buildings. I recently made a bold move and started an apprenticeship to learn carpentry. I figure it will at least get me into shape.”
P: What is your relationship with writing and how has it evolved?
JT: I have always enjoyed reading and have been writing my thoughts down since I learned how. I fell in love with poetry in junior high and I penned many of my own poems. One night at a party sitting around a bonfire, a girl I was digging on asked me to recite one of these poems to her. Well, “I write a lot but I can’t remember any of my poems,” I tell her. From that night on I was determined to figure out how I can write poetry and memorize it all. I came up with a way to remember the lines by placing a silent beat to each poem. I now can think of the beat to a poem and all the words flow to me. Instead of just reciting poems to girls, I’d sing lullabies to them. Naturally this all worked well when I got into music and taught myself guitar and started writing my own songs. My writing has taken on its own character and a life of its own. Maybe I’m a slave to it, I don’t know.
P: Briefly discuss the value that reading adds to both your personal and professional life.
JT: I simply love and crave reading. I’ve learned almost everything I know through the act of reading and yet I will always have more to read about!
P: How would you describe your current literary ventures and what can we look forward to in future posts?
JT: I have started a daily journal documenting all the strange happenings I encounter in life. You really can’t make this stuff up so it’s the best inspiration for stories. I’m sure everyone knows what I’m talking about here. I’ve been gravitating toward short stories, been reading a lot of them and writing my own based on my own experiences or folk tales I pick up here and there. We’ll see where that takes me.
P: What called you to Prose? Describe your experience with the platform so far.
JT: I just stumbled over Prose while playing with my new iPad. It seemed like it could be refreshing and now has become something I look forward to. Reading new posts from other [“Prosers”] and spending the time to put down my own two cents can fill a void in my day. I really enjoy it all and believe it’s good for the human consciousness to read, to write, to think, to communicate.
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This #FridayFeature blog series is designed to help you get to know your fellow community members better. Would you like to nominate someone for interview? Have a question you’re dying to ask of someone on the platform? Send us a private message here or email info@theprose.com anytime.
We are all broken
Inside
All of us
Are trying to pretend that
Everything is okay
When the reality is
We're just like a shattered mirror
A broken glass
And no matter what we do
Even when we could pick up and put the pieces together
It always leaves a mark
And the scars ---
Even if healed
Is still imprinted in our souls and minds
And would always be a reminder
That we
Are
Broken
From Journalism to Fiction: Writing and Ethics
Greetings, word-lovers!
Your words mean the world to us. We just want to thank you once again for being here.
We’d like to also introduce you to this week’s guest writer, Shaun Gibbons. He is a former newspaper journalist turned fiction writer from Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) and has more than 20 years of experience in corporate communications, public relations, and writing/editing.
Let’s welcome him now...
P: As a journalist, was there ever a time when your personal ethics were compromised? How do/did you reconcile that for the sake of the work?
Gibbons: In my time as a junior reporter for a newspaper fresh from university, I had to perform what is inappropriately called a ‘death knock’. For those fortunate enough not to have heard of the term, let alone be in a position to have done one, a death knock is a reporter tasked with turning up unannounced on the doorstep to request an interview with the relative(s) of a recently deceased family member. And if that sounds pretty unsavoury, the pressure to get the interview was put upon you by desk editors: the thought being that the grieving family would only grant one interview, therefore YOU had to get the interview before another rival newspaper.
In my case, the only death knock I had to perform was with a family who, just hours before, had been informed that their only teenage son had been killed in a car crash. I had attended the police press briefing earlier that morning and I knew that other reporters there would have to do the same as me.
In the police car park afterwards, I climbed into a waiting car driven by the paper’s staff photographer and set off for the family address. Other reporters from the press briefing were doing the same, and off we went to see who could get there first.
Unfortunately for me, we got there first. I remember opening the gate and walking slowly up the path to the front door. The curtains were half drawn and I could see shapes of people inside the house. I knocked on the door once and stood back and after what seemed like minutes the door opened.
I didn’t have a script in my head. I never rehearsed what I would say. So when a tearful woman in pajamas appeared in the doorway (presumably the mother of the boy), I apologised to her for the intrusion, and gave my and the newspaper’s condolences, then turned and left.
Was it personal ethics that stopped me from asking for an interview, I don’t know. What I did know, however, was that other reporters who were looking on from the comfort of their cars (secretly thankful it was me, not them, I suspect) would figure the family didn’t want to give and interview, therefore the family would be left alone to grieve in peace.
I went back to the office later that morning and told my news editor what had happened. He just nodded and we never spoke about it again. Thankfully, I never had to do one again – more out of circumstance, than design.
P: What are some of the key differences between journalism and, say, nonfiction or biography? Do you have a stronger affinity of one genre over another--both in writing and reading?
Gibbons: I have very little interest in mainstream journalism, non-fiction and biography nowadays – both as a writer and a reader, except for what was coined as ‘new journalism’ in the late 1960s by writers such as Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Michael Herr.
Those writers understood and toyed with the concepts of truth and perspective, and brought into their work stylistic elements of fiction. I would urge any writer (if they haven’t already) to seek out Picador’s The New Journalism and read for themselves work that blurs the line between journalism, non-fiction and fiction.
P: Briefly discuss some of the early challenges you’ve faced creatively... And most recently?
Gibbons: Well, what can I say? Being creative is all about solving challenges! I used to spend quite a bit of my free time writing fiction and when I did, I drank too much and smoked too much and often stayed up to the small hours deleting large chunks of text I’d just taken hours to write.
Nowadays, having given up smoking and to a large extent drinking, I challenge myself to write as early in the morning as possible.
Dorothea Brande, in her wonderful book called ‘Becoming a writer’, talks about harnessing the unconscious so I take a pencil and paper to bed with me, fall asleep and write whatever shit comes to mind when I wake. It worked for Henry Miller…!
P: If you could resolve any single misconception about what it means to be a “writer/author,” what would it be and why?
Gibbons: The next time you’re confronted by someone at a dinner party who tells those within earshot they are a writer, punch them. Hard. Ideally in the face, or if (more than likely) they’re wearing hipster wire-framed spectacles, knee them in the bollocks.
Writers write. People who talk about writing are just talkers. Writers crave solitude, not attention. People who know me well can vouch for the fact I’m not a ‘people person’. If I could commit a crime that meant solitary confinement (without the need for murder, etc.) then I’d be a happy man.
P: Is there any advice you could give to writers who’d wish to use Twitter and/or Facebook to help reach a wider audience with their writing?
Gibbons: I had a Twitter follower only a few days ago who sent me a series of direct messages saying (and I quote) “I’d gargle bleach to get you to read my free sample on Amazon” and “I would crawl over hot coals to get you to download my free book…”
Would you buy a used car from a salesman who threatened to self-immolate, or purchase groceries from a shop owner who was willing to saw off his own arm?
Writers who use social media to overtly market their work should stop and consider what they want from SM and why. Social media shouldn’t be seen as a digitised sandwich board for users to parade about the net plying their wares. IF writers want to use social media to market their work, then approach with extreme caution.
Your published personality whether on Twitter, Facebook, Ello or whatever, is your only commodity – your work is secondary. Come across like a needy lunatic (see above) then people will treat you like one and think your work is also.
One of the unintended consequences of digital self-publishing is the scourge of all things internetty – link baiting. Many self published writers seem obsessed with click-through figures, downloads and rankings and will go to extraordinary lengths (see above) for those extra few click-through’s and downloads.
I personally don’t use Twitter to plug my published fiction (and I deleted my Facebook page years ago), but I recognise that some writers do and that’s fine. I would say devote more time to your work and less time online. Good work will win out and those writers with psychotic tendencies (see above) will get the medical treatment they need eventually.
P: How would you briefly compare and contrast the use of Facebook and Twitter as a writer?
Gibbons: I think writing communities, of which there are plenty on Facebook, can be a good thing and closed groups are even better if writers want to share and ask for tips/advice, etc. Twitter’s use of 140 characters is a good exercise for writers insofar as learning to keep their text tight.
P: In your opinion, what is social media missing for the writing community as a whole?
Gibbons: I don’t think social media is missing anything. Social media wasn’t invented for writers. I would go as far as to say the internet (and technology as a whole) is slowly taking away the ability as a tool for writers to write. Users don’t want to read lengthy chunks of text on a screen. Writers who write with internet access on their machines often claim to get distracted (oddly enough, by social media). Even things like tablets and newer versions of laptops don’t even come with proper keyboards, for Christ’s sake! Of course, I’m being a little fatalistic about all this…
Social media and, in particular, online communities for writers can be a good thing. Even empowering for some. Just use them wisely and concentrate on what matters: writing.
--Shaun Gibbons
For more information look for @lShaun_Gibbons on Twitter or visit his LinkedIn profile by copying and pasting the following link into your web browser: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/shaunrgibbons
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Stay tuned here each week for more in this #MondayBlogs series— designed to educate and inspire you from the inside out. We’ll give you insights and resources from the literary industry at large as well as exclusives about your own world of words:
-Prose.
He
He has his way with words
That gets me mesmerized
He makes me feel uncomfortable
With his strong mind
His intellect
has got me all smitten
He's hard to please
That's what i thought before
But i understand now
For he just put up his walls
When i see his name
I couldn't help but smile
The butterflies in my stomach--
He makes them wild
His mysteriousness captivated me
like mimosa pudica
I feel trapped with these emotions
Im unfamiliar with