Archive for friends
“Ellie on Wheels”
A former student of mine Elaine Bartels has a truly terrific YouTube channel up and running.
Ellie On Wheels is a channel devoted to nomad life. The goal is to be happy, be free, and to not only survive as a nomad but to thrive with joy, good health and prosperity. Nomad life is a broad term for someone who moves their home frequently. Whether your home is in a car, a van or a trailer, nomad life is a chance to live as you want, on your own terms, without the burden of a mortgage or rent every 30 days. This channel is about living your life in to your best ability while living on wheels. I encourage you to be open to new ideas of what home looks like, and to be curious about what home means to you. I’ve been on a 8 year journey in 8 different vans, surviving in Canada in the most beautiful scenery, during the best and the harshest conditions. Nomad life or, my “life on wheels” began suddenly for me, I was not prepared. I have learned much along the way, I’d be happy to share my knowledge about surviving as a nomad on wheels. I call my vans my “no rent plan” vans!
Don’t hide.
Before I taught my class this afternoon, I visited The Pendulum Gallery downtown to view my friend Lincoln Clarkes‘ marvellous photo exhibition again (it closes tonight). The gallery is a terrific space, which I had *almost* to myself. The two women there, from England, came up to me and started a conversation – a few minutes into which the older of the two asked me whether anyone had ever told me how quite odd I seemed.
Many polite people have asked me that question, and my answer’s typically something like this: “It’s amazing that I’m even allowed outside.” (It is.)
Today, however, I was still trying to find the words when the younger companion said, “Just take the hit and go on.” I did, we all did.
I had the best morning!
LeAnne Flaherty
A few days ago I had the good fortune to chat (via Skype) with advanced undergraduate students at Brooklyn College. Our topic was “parapsychology.” The gifted and nimble instructor of Psych 3585 was LeAnne Flaherty, who was a student in that same class the last time I was invited (by my genius brother-in-law Frank Grasso).
It is such a good class and important topic to study and discuss.
The syllabus says, “Students in parapsychology will learn and practice the concepts and methods of critical thinking used in the science of psychology. Parapsychology is a branch of empirical psychology that has made controversial and not widely accepted claims about the nature of the human mind and human mental abilities. … Through the critical examination of the peer-reviewed parapsychology literature and lectures on the history and methods of parapsychology, students will develop the background knowledge and use skills psychological scientists and scholars use to judge the evidence for extraordinary scientific claims.”
This is a superb way to teach some of the most important things you need to learn at university: critical thinking, the scientific method, and intelligently and ethically communicating findings and argument across disciplines and cultures. …
Brooklyn College knows how to do it right. Thank you to Leanne Flaherty for the invitation and to her students for being so involved and amazing.
LeAnne passed away a few weeks ago. Her friend Daniella wrote on the GoFundMe page she set up for LeAnne: “We all loved Lea so much and will miss her terribly. Let’s carry on her spirit of love, kindness, and silliness in our hearts as a way to keep part of her with us, and to help navigate a world that can be so unfair and difficult.”
I found LeAnne to be a charming and generous and truly friendly person – a terrific colleague, too. I liked her very much. And I could see how much her students loved and admired her.
She was still young. This really hurts.
Marilyn Suriani
From 2016 (a post called “Big Art”):
“What gets installed in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” My friend photographer Marilyn Suriani is preparing a huge installation there – the largest piece is 54-feet wide. It’s beautiful, a continuation of this remarkable phase in her career, which sees Suriani creating nature- and waterscapes in shimmering, rhapsodic colours. This work feels both abstract and earthly.
—
I learned a couple of weeks ago that Marilyn had passed away, in Atlanta, where she had lived and worked for decades. Marilyn was a Sicilian live-wire originally from Philly whom I truly really loved. I had acquired her photo-book Dancing Naked in the Material World in 1991 or so, in my Buffalo, New York publishing days. We got to know each other over the phone; listening to her voice made the sun shine; and she taught me a ton. At my desk right now, I face seven photographs by Marilyn on the wall.
Hers was the first photogallery published in my old e-zine Ellavon, in 1998 or so. You can find a wider array of her work (scanned and printed at a much higher res) on SurianiPhoto.com.
I remember when you said …
Long-time friendship provides glorious blessings that young people, no matter how precocious they are, can ever attain. I love reminding my friends of things they said to me, seeing their incredulity (when they can’t remember) or their widening eyes (when they can). Once, when I was impoverished and truly heartbroken, I was crashing at a dear friend’s place in Manhattan. One afternoon we were watching the Buffalo Bills on TV and eating Chinese food and whooping and yelling. He saw me smile and said, “Yours is the best possible miserable situation.” I have used that phrase hundreds of times over the decades.
Yesterday a friend and I were talking about times you have to cut things off with a loved one. He reminded me of what I had told him once: “The only decision you have to make now is whether to close the gate softly or to slam it shut.”
That was another good one.
No argument
My friend Clarissa on neoliberalism:
We need to stop wailing and wanting. We need to stand still for a bit and get a hold of ourselves. We are destroying something very imperfect for something much, much worse. There is no narrative that actually defends neoliberalism. Nobody has come up with an idea for why it’s good because there is no such narrative. This is something that simply can’t be defended. It seduces us by never even trying to argue its case. And we’ve accepted that like the weakest, most manipulable of pawns.
The same can be said of the technology imperative we see everywhere around us. Artificial Intelligence data centres use almost as much energy (and water resources) as Japan. There has been almost no public discussion of this. “It seduces us by never even trying to argue its case.”
Phil Lesh
One of my dearest friends saw well over a hundred Grateful Dead shows (and remembers the set list from every single one). A few years ago he saw nine (!) Phil Lesh and Friends shows in Port Chester, New York, in one month. He sent me this marvellous archive from the Port Chester shows.
Phil Lesh was a musical genius who increased the musical vocabulary and swelled the listening sensoriums of everyone who paid attention, bringing worlds into us.
“The root of beauty is boldness. That is what’s brought us to one another.”— Boris Pasternak
“Grief Casseroles”
That is the name of Danielle Raymond’s new writing project (on Substack). Danielle is a dear friend of mine whom I met when she was a psychology student taking one of my technical report-writing classes at Kwantlen. Her memory and artistry fashion an exacting lens that renders pain and love with surpassing vividness.
Buffalo’s “Old Pink” is gone …
… having gone up in flames this morning. In the days when I used to swing by (between, say, 1985 and 1993), this legendary dive bar was called “The Pink Flamingo.” There was a glorious ferment there, of artists and musicians and writers and editors and significant others and copious incarnations of riffraff. Made real friends in that place.
Click on the photo below to see a lovely panorama of photographs of the bar published in “The Scoundrel’s Field Guide“:
“La forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel.”
Neil Kennedy
Neil was a truly lovely man. Whenever we saw each other on campus, we would stop and chat. He was happily erudite and gorgeously articulate. (After talking to him, I finally had a handle on the prose of John Donne. That bit of instruction was accomplished on a jam-packed Vancouver bus.)
From Kwantlen‘s announcement:
Neil was a much-beloved member of the English Department for over 20 years, and this loss will be felt deeply by many colleagues, staff, students, and alumni.
Neil’s tremendous kindness, generosity, and unfailing support for students were at the heart of everything he did. Neil was first hired at KPU in 2004, and he played a foundational role in the English department – contributing to the development of the B.A. Major in English and inspiring so many students in his courses. Neil was always at the ready to serve the department wherever help was needed. He was active for a long time on the Search, English Placement Test, and PD Committees. He was also a steadfast member of the Curriculum, Educational Planning, and Library Committees.
Neil brought learning to life for English majors. His dedication to teaching and his passion for all things Renaissance will be dearly missed. Neil’s amazing laugh always filled the English department’s hallway with warmth, and his unfailing wit was a constant source of great conversation and insight. The summer semester was undoubtedly Neil’s favourite as he repeatedly attended Bard on the Beach and shared this passion for theatre with KPU students and colleagues. Whenever Neil took part in the KPU Open House, he would challenge passersby at the English department’s display table to choose any passage from the Riverside Chaucer, defying them to find a quotation that he could not identify.
Neil derived tremendous joy from sharing his knowledge of literature with his students. Teaching was truly his life’s calling. Former students have shared that Neil awakened them to the beauty of poetry. Indeed, Neil was known for adding “hopefully a few moments of beauty” as a learning objective on his course syllabi. Neil also worked for many years in the Learning Centre where he supported students in integral ways during their time at KPU. He cared for KPU students both as young literary scholars and as people on life’s journey. …
The KPU flags will be lowered upon confirmation of a date by the family. A memorial event will take place in the early Fall on the Surrey campus for faculty, staff, and students to pay tribute to Neil.
—
Neil seemed always to be sharing delight in a kind of communion with life and language that he brought others into. To honour him I have made a donation to Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach.
[updated June 15]
Still teaching
Today marks the beginning of my 22nd year teaching at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I still pinch myself that I landed this marvellous gig. Nowadays I am the most senior person in the department in terms of both age and in the number of years “on campus.” The fine folk who hired and then mentored me have retired and gone off to various happy adventures.
In early 2003 my business – Basil Communications Inc. – was not bringing in a lot of dough. My main clients were still recovering from the economic fall-out after 9-11 in the investment community. (Traditionally communications are the first expenses to be cut in hard times.) I was running on fumes. It was hard to think.
A friend gave me some money to make sure I made it through that spring. The instant I deposited the money, my mind cleared, and I went home and applied for jobs at three local universities. Kwantlen set up an interview. It was gruelling but I thought I did well. After a couple of weeks went by without me hearing anything, though, I guessed that I hadn’t gotten the position; I know I shed a tear or two the night I accepted that.
Just as I walked into my Scotia Tower office the next day, my late friend John Fraser asked me whether I’d been hired. As I was telling him I hadn’t been, the phone rang at the front desk. The receptionist said the call was for me. The job, it turned out, was mine.
I still think, thankfully, of those tears that fell the night before I received this news. I’ve never forgotten how much I wanted this job teaching undergraduate students. I’ve also never forgotten that it was a friend’s generosity that cleared my head.
The fellow on the phone that day mentored me through my first several years at Kwantlen. We ended up coauthoring a textbook together.
“A big swing, and it works.”
My friend Kristi Coulter‘s second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, gets some love in this week’s New Yorker. Anna Wiener writes,
The jacket copy for “Exit Interview” describes it as “an intimate, surprisingly relatable” story of “a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.” True enough, and Coulter is particularly attuned to sexism in the workplace, including the way women can internalize corporate logic: when she learns, from an exposé in the ‘Times,’ that a colleague was put on probation after having a stillbirth, Coulter finds herself wondering if there was more to the story. “Well, how long post-stillbirth was she off her game? Are we talking three weeks, or three months?” she thinks. When it comes to her own experiences of sexism, she doesn’t spin off into polemics, or belabor the point. For the most part, the microaggressions—and macroaggressions—speak for themselves. …
The book is mostly written in the present tense, adding momentum to workplace conversations about “the checkout pipeline in China,” or the appropriate Web copy for a DVD promotion. One chapter, loosely structured as a travel itinerary, is written in the second person: “Bienvenue à Amazon France, and prepare to be barely tolerated!” Footnotes are sprinkled throughout, adding meta-commentary: “The Leadership Principles are basically Amazon Commandments . . . in the middle of the night I once told my dawdling puppy to show some Bias for Action and pee already so we could go back to bed.” These notes are unobtrusive and clever, but they are also strange: isn’t memoir already a form of meta-commentary? In the final pages, the writing gets cinematic and a little experimental, as Coulter entertains a fantasy while on a run. A big swing, and it works.
I am thrilled by Kristi’s success. I don’t know a better writer.
Toby Cleary and the insurance company
“B.C. man battling Stage 4 cancer denied insurance coverage for last-hope clinical trials: Maple Ridge’s Toby Cleary was denied insurance for ‘last hope’ clinical trial because he forgot to disclose an ER visit nearly two years before his diagnosis.”
This is from a front page story in today’s Vancouver Sun (by Sarah Grochowski, photo by Ashliey Wells). The Vancouver Province also ran the story.
Toby and his wife Danielle Raymond are friends of mine. I admire them both very much.
Kristi Coulter
My friend Kristi Coulter and I go back a ways – to the old Usenet newsgroup days of the early 90s, particularly the newsgroup alt.music.alternative.female, where her insights enlightened me and her prose style thrilled me. In 1997 I asked her to write for a project I was starting called Ellavon: An ezine of basic culture. My editor’s input into her work consisted of never having a single thing to change in her submissions – nothing, literally nothing, not even a comma (something that had never happened before or since in my career as a professional editor) – and then asking her for another piece.
Kristi’s career as a published writer went quiet for awhile after Ellavon was put on hiatus, but she was very busy professionally otherwise, editing AllMusic.com and then working in a variety of roles at Amazon, which is the topic of her second book, Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career.
The book received a very laudatory prepublication review in the New York Times:
And here’s a very fun interview in The Stranger, Seattle’s famous alternative weekly:
Glionna from Italy
My friend John Glionna has been spending the summer in his ancestors’ home town in Italy, working on a book about the people there. One of the joys of this writer is the way he lets us see rough drafts of the book’s chapters emerge on his terrific blog. His “Pomarica Journal” is dazzling, vivid with the voices of others and with Glionna’s profound friendliness (and a customary goof or two). His photographs are really terrific, too.
(I’ve asked John to create a dedicated photo-gallery on his website. We’ll see what happens!)
Arley
My Kwantlen colleague Arley McNeney was a visionary who welcomed all manner of detail with a humbling level of attentiveness and who accepted everybody, and she made the people around her better. Such a strong good spirit.
Almost all of our interactions were via correspondence or social media, though I finally met her at The Commodore in Vancouver back in 2019. She was there for the headlining Mountain Goats, me for Lydia Loveless, who opened for them.
From our school’s announcement:
It is with profound sadness and a deep sense of loss that we share the passing of our friend and colleague, KPU instructor, Arley McNeney (Cruthers). Arley was a mother, a sister, a daughter, and a friend. She was a highly respected instructor and beloved colleague to those who were fortunate to collaborate and work alongside her. She was a decorated Paralympian and parasport athlete, a talented writer and novelist, an unending builder of community, an advocate for inclusion and disability justice, and a creative linocut artist.
Arley instructed business communications, public relations, and entrepreneurial leadership at KPU. However, her journey into becoming an educator was winding: in 2001 she joined the Canada women’s national wheelchair basketball team and won gold at the Wheelchair Basketball World Championship the next year. She was the recipient of BC’s Premier Athletic Award for New Westminster and in 2004, she was named to Team Canada’s national wheelchair basketball team to compete at the 2004 Summer Paralympics where she helped the team win bronze. In 2006, Arley was named to Team Canada for the 2006 Wheelchair Basketball World Championship. In 2014, Arley received the BC Wheelchair Basketball Society’s Coach of the Year award.
Not only was Arley a successful athlete and coach, she was a former communications/marketing/PR professional for parasports, the founder of an adaptive soccer team that uses disability justice principles, and the author of four novels. Arley’s first novel was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Foundation. She attended the University of Victory and earned an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Arley was an innovative leader in open education, Open Educational Resources (“OERs”), and open pedagogy. In 2019, Arley presented an open-licensed game developed by her applied communication students that focused on instructors developing compassion and empathy for students struggling with (unaffordable) textbook costs and the role OERs can play in supporting students’ well-being and success. Arley’s work was pivotal in the open education movement and the continued work in the area of Zero Textbook Costs (“ZTCs”). That same year, Arley was awarded for Excellence in Open Education by BC Campus.
In addition to being widely recognized as an advocate in the areas of open education, Arley was a tireless scholar and advocate in the areas of decolonization, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), anti-racism and anti-oppression, and disability justice. She collaborated with colleagues across KPU through her work as an Open Education Teaching Fellow, decolonization and Indigenization faculty champion, and disability justice activist. She was an early leader and mentor in developing Open Educational Resources at KPU, and published Business Writing for Everyone in 2019, an inclusive guide to writing in the workplace that has since been adopted, adapted, and remixed by KPU faculty and countless educators around the world. She was regularly consulted on questions of accessibility and UDL in course design and program review, and her expertise and the generosity with which she shared it, are irreplaceable. In recognition of her contributions to supporting social justice, in 2021, Arley was an inaugural recipient of KPU’s Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion awards.
Arley’s focus on supporting students in all aspects of their lives from UDL to food security was unparalleled, and her supportive, non-judgemental, and student-centred approach to teaching and focus on student success, has inspired us to do our best in our work at KPU.
Arley sought to truly understand and engage her students, co-creating empowering learning opportunities with them each semester, and often bringing food to share in the classroom. She was incredibly generous with her time and energy, supporting students and colleagues alike, and sharing her expertise and teaching resources freely.Arley’s legacy is immeasurably rich and will continue through the inspired work of her friends and colleagues, and the thousands of students she taught. Her work and contributions embody the highest values of our university’s motto, and are something we should all aspire to: “through tireless effort, knowledge and understanding.”
The outpouring of emotion and admiration on Twitter has been really something. I am at a loss for words, mostly, or at least for the adequate ones. My colleagues have helped me out in that respect. Melissa Ashman’s thread is close to perfect:
My train
My friends know I love a good train ride. And more than that, I count on one particular line, the Amtrak Cascades, to bring me to and from loved ones in the States. Discontinued at the start of the pandemic, Amtrak restarted partial service a few months ago, and in March Amtrak is bringing back the second train – early morning southbound to Washington State, night-time return to beautiful Vancouver. They’re hiring, and I could not be more pleased.
Below are photo tributes I made to my home stations, in Vancouver and Seattle, a few years back.
The new year
Literally nothing has gone according to plan during my holiday break, except for the love shared with my family and friends. I had to throw away Plan H earlier today.
Classes start next week – two sections of Advanced Professional Communications and one of Technical Report Writing (more fun that it sounds). I am looking forward to meeting my new students.
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