Life at the moment

By Caitlin Kelly

This is a hasty post.

I have been very frustrated of late at the handful of views this blog now gets — unless I also put it on Facebook and Twitter.

Is it that boring?

WordPress tells me 23,000 people follow it and I am appreciative of the loyal band who does show up to read and comment.

Anyway…life for now:

Torrential rain has hit our area — affecting 23 million people. The subways of New York — an essential service — and even the buses! — have been flooded. Streets are impassable. Even the commuter rail system shut for a while. Any climate deniers remaining are absolute ostriches. I moved here in 1989 and have never seen weather like this.

I have a severely arthritic right hip that, until the past two weeks, has really been destroying my quality of life. There have been days I can barely walk and leave the gym in tears of pain. Now, for no reason I can fathom, I am walking almost normally. It is an enormous relief to not be in pain every day for months!

I tutor a teenager in French, a new venture for us both. One of my blog friends in England shared a great BBC site of lesson plans, so we’re using that, conversing and doing some dictations.

I go to a weekly French conversation group at a local library for an hour, then an hour of Spanish after that. Whew! My brain is very tired at the end, but it’s such an easy way to get out of the apartment, free, and have lively chats. One of the women in the French group told us she’d celebrated her 75th birthday by riding an elephant.

Mahjong is a game of tiles that I associate with ladies wearing cat’s eye glasses and bright caftans. Now I am edging my way into it as well, thanks to some neighbors in the building who ask me to join their group from time to time.

I’m still writing for The New York Times, now on my third personal finance story this year for them. I have a second session scheduled this coming week with a global PR agency who hires me to review pitches to journalists that failed to get traction and discuss how they might have worked better. I’m very glad of the income.

I also still coach other writers at an hourly fee; here’s the link. One of my clients recently sold a story we worked on to the Washington Post, a much-coveted outlet for ambitious writers. Another was delighted to find an outlet for a story he had had difficulty placing — and our session was much enhanced by the presence of his tiny perfect hedgehog!

Two great bits of news — we paid off our mortgage! Now we own our apartment outright.

And we leave soon for four days ‘ vacation at a Quebec resort we love, then five days renting a house in Vermont, a state I love and haven’t been back to in decades. October is the perfect time for both. My husband works so hard at his three freelance jobs and we need time off the computer and away from home, which is also our workspace. Can’t wait!

Tradwives and fundi babies: America 2024

Let’s all be frilly — and dependent.

By Caitlin Kelly

Like every immigrant, I moved to the U.S., at 30, filled with hope and optimism for my new future in a country that spends a lot of energy telling the world — and its citizens — that it’s a “city on a hill”, a bastion of freedom with “liberty for all.”

As if.

In the decades since I chose the U.S. — and especially since the election of Donald Trump, unleashing a hatred and racism and ignorance that stuns many worldwide — I’ve become less and less enamored of the shiny rhetoric. The current mood towards immigrants (always a recurring theme here), towards women (back to the kitchen!) and, always, towards non-white Amerians, is becoming more hateful and louder every day.

State after state is moving to restrict access to abortion, trying to criminalize every effort a woman — or teenage girl — makes to control her own body. How dare she! How dare we!

Then there are “tradwives”, a wildly popular genre on social media — women, often white, thin, affluent — who pride themselves on having a lot of children and relying solely on their husbands for economic support.

From The Guardian:

Trad wives can be traced back to the Red Pill Women forum that was set up in 2013. According to research from Julia Ebner in 2020, 30,000 women identified as Red Pill Women or trad wives. As with most far-right trends, most of them appear to be in the US, but due to the networked nature of the modern far right, trends that start stateside don’t remain there. Interviews I conducted revealed that the British far right encourages its women to be trad, with women attending nationalist conferences such as the annual Patriotic Alternative conference, and making a name for themselves on the far-right infosphere.

The subculture shares aesthetics and values across the Atlantic. Long, floral dresses are the norm, idealising a mythic past of feminine modesty. Women should be covered up, as their bodies are just for their husbands. A woman’s role is to stay at home, serving her spouse domestically and sexually, while her partner goes to work to support her. Men should “discipline” women.

Unsurprisingly, they are anti-feminist, with the far right recruiting women to the trad lifestyle by claiming feminism has failed to make them happy. While not a trad wife herself, “alt-right” influencer Lauren Southern shot to fame by claiming feminism taught women “to work 9–5 and drink wine every night until their ovaries dry up”.

I came of age during second-wave feminism, Ms. magazine and Helen Reddy chanting “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers to be ignore!” I grew up in Canada, where abortion has long been readily available legally. I was stunned when I moved to New York and began job hunting in Manhattan in media, what sexist bullshit women were putting up with! I had lunch with a married very senior editor at Newsweek — then a dream job for me — who leaned close and said “I can’t smell your perfume.”

Gross.

I was lucky enough to have parents who never once suggested marriage and motherhood were the only proper uses of my body and intelligence. I was out of the family home at 19, living alone in a tiny apartment, and managing all my own money. As readers here know, I’m ferociously independent in many ways.

I also learned the hard way the real price of deliberate ignorance when my first husband walked out the door for good after barely two years of marriage and quickly married a colleague. I didn’t even know when the mortgage was due — he walked on June 15th…now I know!

Luckily I had a pre-nuptial agreement and he had to pay alimony to get me back on my feet; here’s my recent New York Times story about that.

Which now brings us to fundi babies, a phrase I had gratefully never heard before GOP Senator Katie Britt’s bizarre State of the Union rebuttal.

She sits in a weirdly expensive all-beige kitchen with costly appliances, insisting she’s just a mom like every other decent American, and talks in a breathy little voice — fundi baby — that, apparently, is a powerful dog whistle to any girl or woman raised in an evangelical Christian household — taught to model submission and docility to men.

An explanation, from a Substack by Jess Piper:

I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

It’s hard for me to fathom women who willingly make this choice and keep making it. Call me judgmental and I’m fine with it. Relying solely on a man’s benevolence can leave women abused, homeless and broke. And it does.

No, thanks.

I’m weary of this country’s relentless push to keep women submissive to male power and influence.

This, just as France enshrines abortion in its Constitution.

A life-changing assignment: rural Nicaragua

On assignment in rural Nicaragua

By Caitlin Kelly

It started out as an online discussion with people seeking attention for their organizations, speaking with journalists like me about how best to accomplish that. I met one of the women at a hotel bar to talk further, and she began sending me story pitches about water and sanitation projects in Nicaragua, the second-poorest nation (after Haiti) in this Hemisphere.

I knew I could never place them — and made a bold suggestion: take me there and I’d write several stories for their own use, all expenses paid, plus a fee. It happened!

It became a truly life-changing, eye-opening week, full of joys and surprises and discoveries and adventures. The woman in charge of WaterAidAmerica’s PR brought a blogger from Maine, me, and a Mexican photographer. None of us had met before, even though we’d spend the next week working closely in 90+ degree temperatures. We all converged at the airport in Managua, a shockingly brief three hour flight from the casual and nonchalant affluence of the Atlanta airport — where even a sandwich costs more than a day’s wage for a Nicaraguan earning a typical $324 a month.

I lived for a while in Mexico and have been back several times. I’d been to Venezuela, so I had seen some Latin American poverty. This was next level — horse-drawn carts on city streets.

We flew in a very small aircraft — they weighed us! — to Bilwi, on the Pacific coast. I love small planes and enjoyed being able to really see the countryside.

Our flight from Managua to Bilwi

Every morning, after breakfast at the hotel, we’d pile into a rickety black minivan, praying the AC was working as the temperature climbed and climbed. Sometimes we had to get out and push it.

We visited tiny villages and spoke to residents finally gaining access to working toilets and wells, after losing hours every day fetching water for cooking, cleaning and hygiene. And this in a very hot country.

It was a huge insight into how spoiled anyone is with clean, plentiful running water in their home!

We saw plenty of children, smaller than healthy — their growth stunted by malnutrition.

We saw almost no cats or dogs, something wealthier people take for granted.

Dinner on the verandah of the wooden house we stayed in

We stayed one night in a large, wooden house on stilts…the shade beneath offering a respite with a hammock and a place for animals. The interior floor was smooth and shiny and immaculate. There were large windows with no glass. We slept in cots beneath mosquito nets. In all my travels — 41 countries so far — this might be the most memorable of all. The hospitality was gentle and kind, food cooked on a clay stove. The village had no electricity or running water. It was, by every North American standard, poor. It felt welcoming.

The next morning we walked to the river’s edge through a forest — followed by the family’s turkey, gobbling away. The edge was steep and sandy and an older female villager in gum boots casually wielded a machete and cut it into four pieces to make a seat for us in the awaiting wooden dugout canoe. Growing up in Canada, I was happy in a canoe — this was very narrow!

On assignment in Nicaragua for WaterAid — Jen in the bow of a dugout canoe

I can so easily picture it all still — a decade later. We spoke no shared language (they spoke Miskitu) but we managed to make it work, and had translators for interviews.

For a group of strangers — different ages, skills and nationalities — we quickly formed a tight and happy unit, heading out for beers after a long day of work.

A typical home

We drove long hours down dusty roads past wooden houses painted purple and yellow and emerald green.

We gratefully drank as much cold water as we were given.

The clay stove at the wooden house

When we finally parted at the Managua airport, the Canadian-born country director, a dead ringer for Hagrid!, said: “Ok, no tears!” Unlikely, perhaps, but true, we were sad to leave and to leave one another’s daily company.

I met the local team back home in New York to debrief at WaterAid’s office there, and, as we assembled around the table, I found myself — to my shock — in tears.

Try climbing those steps in the dark, wearing a headlamp!

Reporting in Bilwi, Nicaragua for WaterAid

Our aircraft from Managua to Bilwi — and back!

Linda’s home, where we slept and ate and rested

That week had moved me deeply, in ways I never expected, and the tremendous care and kindness with which we were treated there, by Nicaraguans and the group’s staff, was unprecedented for me; journalism, unless you’re at the very top/pampered levels, is a macho, self-reliant, poorly-resourced affair — especially for anyone not on staff.

It forever changed how I wanted to work, to be treated with such respect and kindness.

It reminded me how incredibly affluent many of us are, in relationship to people whose lives we never see.

It reminded me that poverty doesn’t have to equal squalor — an ugly preconception.

And to never carelessly keep a tap running!

Flaco — the eagle owl that united so many of us

By Caitlin Kelly

His name was Flaco, and he was a Eurasian eagle owl, his feathers the most glorious mix of black, rust and sienna, his distinctive ear tufts sometimes blowing sideways in the Manhattan wind. His eyes were brilliant yellow, his talons impressive. He was beautiful and ferocious — and very much out of his natural habitat.

We all feared the day it might kill him, as it did when he recently flew into a window on the upper East Side, one of many birds who die such a terrible death.

Flaco was born and raised in captivity, but set free a year ago from the Central Park Zoo by a vandal who cut the wires of his cage. Thus began an adventure shared, thanks to social media, with many fans worldwide, as Flaco flew onto construction sites, water towers, apartment balconies — all the familiar landmarks of the city.

Can you imagine finding him perched on your balcony? It was a true celebrity sighting!

He was much photographed, allowing his many admirers on social media — I saw him daily on Twitter — to cheer him on as he swooped high above urban towers, finding rats and pigeons for his diet. Whether asleep or taking flight or in flight, or gently hooting above all the city noise, he became a somehow comforting presence in a time when everything we see on the news — Gaza, Darfur, Ukraine, the election, climate change — is so relentlessly awful and depressing and overwhelming. Flaco was gorgeous and free and someone we could all cheer for without reservation, profess our admiration for without fear of rancor or argument.

He was also an introduction to bird life in a way us non-birders never appreciated — asleep, preening, spreading his wings, spitting out the remains of a mouse or rat. The many excellent photos of him allowed us a detailed view of avian life.

The New York Times recently ran a large article about him, to the delight of all his fans — and the photographers who tracked him so carefully:

obsessed Flaco fans scoured the internet to find out more about his past, learning that he hatched on March 15, 2010, at the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, N.C. He apparently had younger and older siblings named Gertrude, Salazar, Stan, Morrisey, Boston and Thatcher; and his parents, Xena and Watson, were the offspring, respectively, of Martina and Sinbad, and Nyra and Ezra — owls who traced their lineage back to Eurasian eagle-owls from Europe. The German-born photographer Anke Frohlich noted that some New Yorkers identified with Flaco as a fellow immigrant, another outsider who learned to live as “a stranger in a strange land.”

This, too:

The owl, once described by a frequent zoo visitor as a grumpy and slightly pudgy bird, reinvented himself as New York’s most majestic raptor — the “Prince of the city,” as the dancer Heather Watts put it, who has become a captivating symbol of freedom, resilience and the possibility of renewal.

Then — maybe a first for the Times — a front page obituary:

Ruben Giron, 73, a registered nurse who lives on 112th Street, said he had wept Saturday morning when he heard the news.

“He’s a symbol of just enjoying being out and letting the sun hit you,” he said. “It’s a heart-opening experience of what it means to be free.”

He added: “We’re all figuring out how to live life. That’s what we’re doing, and he did it.”

He will be very much missed.

The toughest teaching challenge — student suicide

The campus is lovely…a lamp-post

By Caitlin Kelly

This story, which ran recently in The New York Times Magazine, was powerful, and really hit home for me, as someone who taught at Pratt Institute, 2014-2015, during which time a student died by suicide.

The author focused on Worcester Polytechnic, which suffered seven deaths by suicide in a short time, forcing the college to look deeply at how it was teaching, and treating, its students.

What hit me hard was how unprepared professors were:

The first death happened before the academic year began. In July 2021, an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute was reported dead. The administration sent a notice out over email, with the familiar, thoroughly vetted phrasing and appended resources. Katherine Foo, an assistant professor in the department of integrative and global studies, felt especially crushed by the news. She taught this student. He was Chinese, and she felt connected to the particular set of pressures he faced. She read through old, anonymous course evaluations, looking for any sign she might have missed. But she was unsure where to put her personal feelings about a loss suffered in this professional context. What was the appropriate channel for processing, either with co-workers or students, the sorrow and fear that the death of a student inspired?

I was an adjunct professor at Pratt, an expensive private school in Brooklyn with a small, distinctive campus. I was thrilled to have the opportunity, even though it meant getting up at 6 a.m. for an hour’s drive for my 10:00 a.m. class — if I left any later I would get stuck in traffic. I tried, once, and almost was late for my own class.

I taught freshman composition, which the snobs sneer at but I was happy to do. My fall class had only 13 students. Towards the end of the semester, one stopped coming and, one night, emailed me to say they were feeling fragile. I urged them to go, immediately, for help.

But they left the school. Only months later did I find out how serious it had been, and the student thanked me for being one of the few teachers who had cared enough about her mental health.

I also taught a blogging class and it was in that class I suddenly had the challenge of comforting my shocked students after one of them had died on campus by suicide.

I don’t recall getting any guidance at all from the dean or the school as to how to discuss this with students — or not.

It was frightening and disorienting and all I wanted to be was useful, even though I had no training in that or institutional help to do so.

“It was a very dark time on campus,” Foo told me. “Faculty were being asked to take on a role that I think historically we haven’t been asked to play.” Her own anxiety intensified. She felt herself tensing anytime she looked at her work email. Even when there was no crisis announcement, faculty and staff members flooded one another’s inboxes with long group-email chains, processing fear and rage that had nowhere else to go.

When you teach as an adjunct, you are very much a second-class citizen — no office, no private place to hold needed office hours to meet with students, no backup at all. The dean was the sort of man who would walk away from me mid-sentence, clearly unwilling to offer me any advice. I really needed it sometimes! I knew no one on the staff, either adjunct or full-time; I made one friend because we sat in the cafeteria in the mornings at the same time, a visual artist.

My heart breaks for any student who feels this is their only or best option.

Have you, as a teacher or professor, faced this on your campus?

Want to sell your stories? Our event Feb. 25 is for you!

By Caitlin Kelly

This weekend, I and a friend in London, Matt Potter, are offering a 90 minute webinar to offer our best advice for how to sell your stories to websites, magazines, newspapers.

Pitching your story ideas is never easy and we’ve done a lot of it — successfully!

The event is 90 minutes and will include 40 minutes for your questions and answers.

I hope you’ll join us and share!

Register on Eventbrite

Memories of my mother (deceased Feb. 15, 2020)

By Caitlin Kelly

As longtime readers here know, ours was not a smooth, close, loving relationship. More so when I was much younger and lived alone with her for a year in Toronto and one in Montreal — mostly sent to boarding school all year and summer camp all summer.

We had no contact at all in the final decade of her life. She lived in a nursing home in Victoria, BC and I 25 miles north of New York City, where she was born. It was her American citizenship — which she later renounced for a Canadian one — that allowed me to obtain a green card, legal residence.

She died alone, sitting in her armchair watching TV, probably as easy a death as any of us might want. She was 85 and had somehow outlived breast cancer (radical mastectomy on one side), thyroid cancer at 30, a meningioma (massive brain tumor) in her late 60s. Then COPD and a colostomy. It was a lot.

She had me very young, at 23, having married my Canadian father when she was 17, desperate to flee her difficult mother and the wealthy world of expectations she had grown up in. Vancouver in the early 1950s was a dreary, dull cry from glamorous New York nightclubs but, typically, she found fun and modeled for the Vancouver Sun and opened an art gallery with my father, a wealthy young man Vancouver born and bred.

I was born there, but we moved to London so he could make films for the BBC. We stayed about three years, then moved to Toronto, where I grew up. Their marriage was not a happy one, and they divorced when I was seven, not as common in the mid 1960s. I went off to boarding school at eight.

I never knew, never asked, how she survived financially.

She never attended university but benefited from a powerful mix of charm, Mensa level intelligence, beauty and her willingness to try all sorts of new things: food editor, fashion editor, magazine writer, broadcaster. She had a year-long TV talk show in Montreal, so we lived there when I was 12. I have no doubt her mother, an heiress from Chicago, helped out. I’m not sure that glossy black mink coat with emerald green silk lining was possible on a journalist’s salary.

And she was much wooed. Never won. She preferred independence and solo travel to being long attached to any man. She never re-married.

She threw great birthday parties for me, two at hotels.

She dove into a hotel pool and broke her neck — but went off to India anyway in a cervical collar.

She was a risk-taker, always up for an adventure, and traveled Latin America alone in her 40s, teaching me to wedge a chair beneath the door handle of the room in case of intruders.

In my 20s, we visited Peru together, freezing on a night train through the Andes, visiting Machu Picchu, walking across the floating islands of Lake Titicaca. We got altitiude sickness in Cuzco and lay in bed all day ordering room service tomato soup.

We spent a Christmas in Cartagena, and got heatstroke.

I’m maybe six or seven — before they split up

I left her care for good when I was 14 after she had a manic breakdown in Mexico. It scared me and I went to live with my father.

After that I saw her once a year when she would send me a ticket to wherever she was then: Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia. The closest we ever lived again was when she lived in Bath and I in Paris on a journalism fellowship. Then, it was once a year or less, as she moved to BC, a six-hour flight for me. She drank a lot and refused to even consider stopping. I begged.

We had too many events where she was drunk and angry and I grew tired of dealing with it alone so I gave up.

We lost her mother when I was 18, an extremely wealthy woman who had managed to not pay taxes to any form of government — including American — for decades. It was a mess.

She lost her only brother, Tony, a few years older, when I was 12.

I never met her father and she only met him twice — her mother re-married four more times.

She had a few beaux, including one older man who was very kind to me and whose daughter, my age, re-connected with me decades later by social media — she, too, was a writer and writing coach.

Did she love me? I assume so.

I know, that sounds cold, but she was not one for hugging and kissing and wild displays of affection. She would let my Christmas gifts languish at the border because she didn’t feel like paying the customs duties. She could be lacerating.

Complicated is likely the best word.

I miss playing jacks with her, her long fingernails always offering an advantage.

Our Scrabble games were ferocious, two highly competitive women!

She taught me to play gin rummy.

She refused to help me manage my finances, forcing me to figure it out — a useful tough-love way to achieve an important goal.

She disliked cooking, so we used to joke that when smoke came out of the kitchen, dinner was ready.

We laughed long and hard.

But the fights…when her voice got high and sweet and syrupy, that was it.

After she died, three very large cardboard boxes arrived, sent by her dutiful executrix — a woman who hated me. Without a word of warning as to their contents, I opened the second one to find a green plastic tub, the kind that might contain won ton soup.

My mother’s ashes.

Now they sit inside a large basket atop an armoire in the living room, with a small oil portrait of her painted in early happy years by my father.

I joke it’s the only time we’ve been in the same room without arguing.

It’s actually comforting.

Cynthia von Rhau

The vicarious pleasures of others’ rural life

By Caitlin Kelly

I am so not a rural person!

I lasted 18 months in small town New Hampshire when I was 30 and it just about killed me: broke, lonely, no jobs, super unfriendly people and a boyfriend in medical residency who was either away and exhausted or home and exhausted.

It was a bigger culture shock to leave cosmopolitan Montreal and its bilingual nature and style for plain-Jane, no makeup, no perfume, how DARE you care about fashion New Hampshire than leaving Toronto for eight months’ of a journalism fellowship in Paris.

So the fantasy of a farmhouse and lots of land is very much not mine.

I love looking at photos of rural life — I admit to subscribing to a few magazines featuring this life, albeit an upscale one.

I love the raw beauty of it on visits.

But to live in, 24/7?

We recently spent a day and a half in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania — Amish country — visiting a friend who’s living there for a while.

It was like a dream state.

photos: Jose R. Lopez

Long clotheslines full of small black trousers and single-color plain dresses.

Men and boys in wide-brimmed straw hats.

Girls and women in bonnets.

Black horse-drawn buggies clip-clopping past.

The Amish, like many such religious communities, live by strict rules and everyone has to abide by them.

That alone is anathema for me, maybe having spent my years ages eight to 13 in a boarding school with endless endless rules, very few of which made any sense beyond avoiding a lawsuit by an irate parent or, rarely, personal injury.

We literally had to fill out a paper permission slip in order to make a phone call, detailing who we wanted to speak to. The phone was in some weird cupboard under the stairs. Hogwarts, it ain’t!

I did love our distinctive uniform — while Toronto’s four other girls’ schools wore tunics, we sported a handsome Hunting Stewart tartan kilt and tie. Our blazer was dark greeen wool, as were our knee socks.

I did love some of the school’s traditions, but being shouted at by ancient grouchy housemothers got really tedious by ninth grade — and I was told I could not return after that year.

I’ve now lived in a co-op apartment building for decades — and it, of course, imposes stupid rules as well.

The need to adhere to arbitrary rules set by others? No thanks.

I know rural life, for some, is bliss — room for horses and cows and llamas and a huge garden. For me, it smacks of lonely boredom, too far from a chic cafe or indie film house.

I do love several rural women on Twitter, like textile artist Rowena Dugdale, in western Scotland and Alison O’Neill, whose photos of her Yorkshire views, sheep and gorgeous border collie Shadow, make us all sigh! The only time (yet!) I’ve seen those stunning Yorkshire views is on TV, in shows like All Creatures Great and Small.

I do love silence and nature, maybe in smaller doses than a two-hour-plus drive to a city and endless mud season.

But I also treasure a bustling city street, people-watching the stylish, being a flaneuse (lazy wanderer) and a very good gin martini at a hotel bar.

And yet — of course — farming is becoming a hot-button political issue in Europe as 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are from agriculture, reports The New York Times.

One of the blog followers, who’s become a friend, grew up in a cottage on the moors, home-schooled, with a pony.

Swoon!

Do you live somewhere rural?

Do you love it?

The endless song and dance of freelance/creative life

By Caitlin Kelly

This new book by a friend from Toronto needs to be as visible as possible to find readers —

which is why I wrote about it here. Mutual aid is key!

This is an excellent discussion, on Vox, of how much time and energy (hello, blogging!) many creatives now must spend endlessly promoting ourselves and our work:

The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from nine-to-five middle managers to astronauts to house cleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. For some, it looks like updating your LinkedIn connections whenever you get promoted; for others, it’s asking customers to give you five stars on Google Reviews; for still more, it’s crafting an engaging-but-authentic persona on Instagram. And for people who hope to publish a bestseller or release a hit record, it’s “building a platform” so that execs can use your existing audience to justify the costs of signing a new artist.

It is really tedious and really necessary!

No more working away in obscurity hoping to be “discovered” — especially if everyone you’re competing with for work or commissions is very much visible and audible.

I confess, I have so far managed to survive nicely without using TikTok and YouTube, although I’ve considered both. I don’t think my target audiences for coaching live on those platforms, so for now Twitter is my go-to, still. I only today (!) looked at the number of lists there I’ve been added to and it’s surprisingly (to me) really extensive. I’m flattered!

So I blog (only once a week, now); I tweet, multiple times every day but not just monologue and self-promotion — but fun and funny interactions with others there, allowing my personality to show, for better or worse! I see people who only sellsellsellsellsell and think you are sooooooo boring!

More from Vox:

You can see this tension play out in the rise of “day in my life” videos, where authors and artists film themselves throughout their days and edit them into short TikToks or Reels. Despite the fact that for most people, the act of writing looks very boring, author-content creators succeed by making the visually uninteresting labor of typing on a laptop worthwhile to watch. You’ll see a lot of cottagecore-esque videos where the writer will sip tea by the fireplace against the soundtrack of Wes Anderson, or wake up in a forest cabin and read by a river, or women like this Oxford University student who dresses up like literary characters and films herself working on her novel. Videos like these emulate the Romantic ideal of “solitary genius” artistry, evoking a time when writing was seen as a more “pure” or quaint profession. Yet what they best represent is the current state of art, where artists must skillfully package themselves as products for buyers to consume.

It’s precisely the kind of work that is uncomfortable for most artists, who by definition concern themselves with what it means to be a person in the world, not what it means to be a brand. There’s been a fair amount of backlash to this imperative, recently among musicians on TikTok.

This pathetic pile is my desk drawer!

My dears, as I bang this out on my laptop on top of the dining table (we have no office space), I’m still in my sweaty workout clothes from spin class. I have zero impulse to show anyone how I work. The most essential thing, anyway, is how I think. That’s unique to me and I’m not clear that blasting it across social media helps anyone much.

It’s not even noon, and I’ve already emailed an editor and sources for two separate stories. I still have to deal with paperwork for one of them and am also planning a Feb. 25 webinar on how to pitch…with a pal in London. We’ll split the proceeds, maybe a few hundred dollars each. It will be a lot of fun — but also a logical place to pitch my own individual coaching sessions. None of this activity is the least bit photogenic! Admin. rarely is.

I really loathe the word “brand” when it refers to creatives….all I can picture is a piece of hot iron hitting a cow’s ass.

The midwinter zhuzh

By Caitlin Kelly

Oh, look!

One more gray, cold windy day.

Then another!

And another!

As I write this, all I see out our window is gray, gray and more gray.

Winter, kids.

The fragrance and beauty of the Christmas tree is now a memory and it’s months til we start seeing more natural color.

Hence, a good time to make our homes a little cheerier.

Some ideas:

Fresh linens

So many sales are on now, and a new set of sheets or a gorgeous duvet cover might be just the ticket. Changing your current sheets and pillowcases more often is just a healthy habit (weekly, for sure.) We splurged on this linen duvet cover last year (pictured above) from Garnet Hill and love it. Some of my favorite suppliers (some more $$$ than others) are Sferra, Anthropologie, Garnet Hill, The Company Store and Brooklinen.

Fresh towels

Makes me feel like I’m in a good hotel! A thick bathmat, a pretty set of hand towels…The New York Times has a consumer advice column called (oddly) Wirecutter and they make a lot of helpful recommendations.

Fresh flowers

This is a weekly part of our budget, whether a few tulips or gerberas or three huge bunches to mix and match. I always try to include some greenery (usually only found at a florist) like eucalyptus (tall, fragrant) or my favorite, silver dollar eucalyptus, which is flat and pale green and more interesting, Having a small collection of vases (and maybe floral foam) makes it easy to add some color in every room, from a single-bloom bud vase to a taller vessel. Flea markets, thrift shops and antique stores (or Ebay and Etsy) offer some options.

Candles — votives, tapers, scented

We use candles in every room — votives on the bathtub edge, tapers at the dinner table, pillar candles in lanterns, a scented candle at bedside. There are few sources of light as beautiful and calming, especially just before sleep and waking up. So much nicer than bright light right away,.

A cozy throw

Cashmere if ever possible! Waffle-texture cotton or wool, in a glorious color. Perfect for napping. These from Garnet Hill. $109 and up, are waffle weave cotton in five soft pretty colors.

A selection of teas — and a lovely teapot

No sad little bags in a mug! Having a proper teapot, even a two-cupper, is so much nicer — this one, at $50, is gorgeous! It’s got a bird and flowers and butterflies — a modern version of a classic antique design, Famille Rose. (Here’s a lovely scented candle in the same ceramic pattern — the pair would make such a pretty gift!)

We always have a decent selection, from loose leaf Earl Grey to this spicy Mariage Freres blend, a few herbal options and PG Tips, what the British call “builders’ tea”…strong and basic.

Polish, dust, vacuum

Oooooh, sounds like fun! But hear me out….in these long months of low winter light it’s easy to overlook dust bunnies and places that could really use a few minutes of Brasso. All our cutlery is flea market silver plate, with a very few pieces of my late mother’s elegant 50’s sterling, so I polish a lot…and enjoy it. But so many spots are easy to overlook — the backs and arms of chairs and sofas (even without pets) that gather dust (I use a lint roller) and light bulbs and fabric and paper lampshades too.

Add a cheerful throw rug

Each morning I step out of bed onto a small handmade rug with a big bird on it. It’s so cheery — $45 at an antique shop in Maryland. One of my go-to places for fab small rugs is Dash & Albert, named for the designer’s two dogs. I love this one, in crisp black and white stripes, $164 for a 3×5 (good size beside a bed.) Or there’s this explosion of color, which wouldn’t work in our place but is so bright and pretty! A 3×5 for $56 from Wayfair.

Life these days — busy!!

By Caitlin Kelly

All The President’s Men!

So much for slowing down.

I haven’t been this busy in a while.

I’m coaching other writers, two in one day this week — Idaho and California.

I mentor two young female journalists, one in Minnesota and one in West Virginia, through a formal matching program called Report for America. We speak every few weeks and I answer any questions they might have.

I’m working on three assignments — a profile of a fellow Canadian, a singer, for the Globe and Mail (my first employer!), an essay for Next Avenue and another personal finance story, about young widows and widowers, for The New York Times.

I’m planning a webinar for freelancers with my British pal Matt Potter in London.

Getting to know a younger friend from Ukraine who’s interested in journalism, am showing her a few classic films about the business. We started with The Paper, (1994) which is hilarious and very realistic — about a NYC tabloid. Having survived a year as a writer at the New York Daily News, it really hits home,

In the middle of this, every Wednesday I down tools and enjoy an hour of French conversation at a local library, followed by an hour of Spanish. This is quite enough for my brain! The mid-week break is so welcome, as is the lively mix of people. Our French group is amazing — almost all women, including a classical musician, a former ballerina, a former art historian and a former theater teacher. One woman knits the most extraordinary sweaters!

Friends from Canada have also recently been to NY, one of whom I had lunch with in Manhattan, the other I literally had no time to see. People have no idea what life is like here! Much as I love seeing old friends from far away, it’s an hour’s drive into the city for me, and $50+ for garage parking if I can’t find a street spot — thousands of which have been taken away by restaurant sheds and bike rental spots. A simple meal with someone can cost me $75 at least, in all. My arthritic hip is too painful to manage the commuter train and its very long platforms.

I did manage to see the fantastic Manet/Degas show at the Met Museum and hope to see some shows this season at the New York City Ballet. One reason I enjoy living here is this quick and ready access to Manhattan’s cultural events.

I’m finally reading more books — Pineapple Street, a new novel by Jenny Jackson, and Scattershot, the memoir by Bernie Taupin, Elton John’s lyricist. I so love Elton John’s music (his original name is Reginald Dwight) and it’s fascinating learning about Taupin’s influences. I have a big stack on the bedside table, including (!) two books about 1923 and the Weimar Republic.

And you….what news?