WikiHomer

The Iliad still matters. 

We tend to think of canonical literature as static.  The more established a work, the more ossified we're likely to consider it.  If you imagine Homer right now, you're probably picturing him as a marble bust -- turned to stone and put on a pedestal.  But even the most canonical text is really a shifting, mutable thing.  In this podcast from The New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn talks with Blake Eskin about a new translation of the Iliad, our evolving views on the epic's authorship, and what both say about contemporary society (Hint: it has something to do with the internet).  

Listen to the podcast here: The Homeric Wars: A Podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn: The New Yorker

Autobiography of an Ex-passive Writer

By Kate Zavack

Nobody told me to be careful when I started reading Jane Austen in eighth grade, or warned me when I opened Les Misérables for the first time: nineteenth century literature is dangerous stuff for impressionable young writers. I wasn’t ready to emulate that syntactical complexity; by high school I was out of control. My sentences needed their own paragraphs, my paragraphs needed their own pages.  My clauses had clauses, and my subjects disagreed with their poor predicates.  It was a bad scene, man.

It wasn’t Jane Austen’s fault, and it wasn’t Victor Hugo’s.  They knew what they were doing.  So did George Eliot and Tolstoy and Dickens.  So where was I getting lost?  What was leading me astray? It was that sneaky trickster, passive voice.

“What’s so dangerous about passive voice?” you ask.  “Should I fear for my coherence? My sanity? My life?”

Calm down.  You can use passive voice safely.  If you construct a sentence passively because you decide it's appropriate, you’ll be okay.  The trouble with passive voice is that you can use it to avoid responsibility for your words and ideas.  You don’t have to define your terms.  You don’t have to explain causality.  When you use passive voice, you don’t have to state who did what to whom, you can get by with just the “what” and the “whom.”  Once you leave out the “who,” the “how” and the “why” are next on the chopping block.  And then you’re in a world of confusion.

Meanwhile, back in high school, I didn’t know any of that yet.  I used passive voice freely, never thinking to make sure I had a “who,” a “what,” and a “whom” clearly stated in my head, if not in my sentences.  My ideas were hazy and incomplete, and that’s I wrote such long, convoluted sentences: if you can’t articulate a point clearly and concisely in your head, you certainly can’t do it on paper.

But my life was about to change.  Tenth grade English teacher and living legend Nonia Gay Jones had a rule: her students were not allowed to write more than five percent of their sentences in passive voice.  Only five percent? That was like, impossible!

Actually, it wasn’t.  Slowly I came around and broke my habit.  My writing matured, as did my literary analysis.  I started to understand the rule, to cherish it, and to enforce it.  By my last semester of college, I was scrawling in red pen across friends’ drafts: “PASSIVE!!! UNCLEAR!!! INCLUDE ‘THE WHO’ IN YOUR SENTENCE!!!” 

All caps. Exclamation points. Red ink.  Let’s pretend I wasn’t totally annoying.

Kate the Elder

By Kate the Elder

                I always tell our small business clients that their advantage is that they are people with stories, and Northrop Grumman is a massive machine with a slick PR campaign.  That is why all their written material needs to project their unique voice, the voice of someone the client could look in the eye, shake a hand, and (c’mon, c’mon) award a multimillion dollar contract for doing something easy.

                So, in making my first blog post all about our company, I didn’t follow my own advice – I should have told you about me (though I assumed since only my family and Kate the Younger, my one employee, read this, it might not be necessary).  I will rectify that mistake now, and at the same time follow my second rule of writing (1. Project a unique, active voice, 2. Never write from scratch something you have already written and stashed on the hard drive somewhere).

                When we joined the Affinity Lab (our coworking space in DC, about which you will hear much more in future blog posts), I had to fill out an application that asked what my most rewarding life experience had been.  That led to a diatribe that I present here as a pretty good, 3 minute tour of my life for the last 49 plus years:

That is an incredibly difficult question for an old person like me who has led an incredibly rich and lucky life.  I’ve given birth, then raised that mewling infant into a confident artist starting this year as a freshman at the Pratt Institute.  I helped a mean ass ewe give birth to triplets (and by “helped,” I mean untangled the three while they were still in the womb, which is like doing a big slimy Rubik’s cube in the dark, and yanked the three out) – we bred one, sold one, and ate one: rewarding on so many levels.  I worked twenty years in the U.S. Senate for the likes of John Glenn and (mostly) Herb Kohl where I got a hug from Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Davey Jones, and Jack Lalane (not on the same day), got to collaborate with Ted Kennedy, Robert C. Byrd, and Dale Bumpers (all personal heroes), and was anthraxed (got better).  I saw the Jackson Five in concert from the third row at a stadium next to the Chicago stockyards when they were still stockyards and smelled that way and when the brothers still wore orange jump suits with fringe on the arms; Sly and the Family Stone opened. I got cancer and (again) got better, but not before losing several internal and external body parts and all my hair (hair grew back).  I went to grad school at Oxford with now prime minister David Cameron (who wouldn’t remember me) and fabulous author and writing teacher Wilton Barnhardt (who would); in a related experience, I had a book dedicated to me, which would have been at least emotionally rewarding had the heroine, also based in part on me, not have died at the end, a drug addicted whore (I am neither, but that is why they call it fiction).  I can cook all the food, well, for parties of 100 or more, and do whenever I can. With my husband, I built from nothing on a wooded track of land in the Shenandoah Valley, a multiproduct sustainable farm with a large and loyal customer base (before deciding we didn’t want to spend all of our time driving produce and meat around and transitioned the enterprise from an unprofitable business to an expensive hobby).  I had chicken cooked in a old oil barrel and pie at my second wedding, which was more fun than my first.  I built from nothing Active Voice, a writing company that works for people we like or believe in, employs people we like and believe in, and allows me to work from anywhere in the world I can get wireless.  I could go on, but I can’t pick a “most rewarding.”  My hierarchy of happiness and achievement is horizontal.

Bildungsblog

By Kate the Younger

One of the perks of my job is that I’m forced to write every day.  As much as I love the written word – or rather, in proportion to how much I love it – I find nothing more daunting than choosing which words to put on a blank page.  Without an assignment, I’d be in a chronic state of writer’s block. I’d never need to buy new writing utensils, and the pen and pencil manufacturers would see huge dips in their bottom lines.  The overall impact on the economy would be untold.  Fortunately, my boss won’t let that happen to me or the economy, and I am now, in addition to my formal post as director of operations, the co-host of the Active Voice blog.  Hello, readers!

Truly, there are few greater blessings for a young writer than to have the opportunity to write frequently and freely, and most importantly, to be held accountable for her productivity.  However strong one’s inclination for writing is, it’s not talent or taste, but perseverance that really carries the day. Or so Ira Glass assures me:

It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions…It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.[i]

Thanks, Ira.  That means a lot to me.  What this means for you, readers, is that you are bearing witness to the “volume of work” that I’m supposed to go through, for better or for worse.  I hope to work through many writerly growing pains here.  I hope it’s not painful for both of us.  I will do my best to share what is interesting, beautiful, and useful for writers, Washingtonians, professionals, and of course, my many fans mom.

 

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 [i] Ira Glass.  <http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/4931415362/nobody-tells-this-to-people-who-are-beginners-i>.

Active Voice is Blogging!

                Welcome to Active Voice’s inaugural blog post – all the excitement of the 2009 inauguration without the endless lines, overpriced souvenirs, and historic swearing-in of our nation’s first black president.  Oh, and Aretha Franklin.  We don’t have Aretha Franklin.

                For those of you who don’t know who Active Voice is (Seriously?  You don’t know who we are and you chose this blog to read out of the 2.4 trillion that go online each day?   Could you let us know why, because we obviously have inadvertently marketed well, and we would like to be able to repeat): we are a small writing and editing firm serving nonprofits, government agencies, small businesses, corporations, and Congress.  Most of our clients are in the DC area, and we work from DC (in the fabulous co-working space, Affinity Lab), Greenville VA (our world headquarters, the porch at Green Fence Farm), Staunton, VA (birthplace of Woodrow Wilson and the Statler Brothers), and occasionally Brooklyn (New York), Bequia (in the Grenadine Islands), and points beyond (not that you need to concern yourself with where we type in relation to where you sit – with wireless available almost everywhere, we can, at a moment’s notice, be virtually looking over your shoulder, correcting your grammar, and polishing your prose).

                Our clients right now mostly fall into two categories: large nonprofits, government agencies, or DC firms for whom we write and edit reports, testimony, proposals, web content, white papers, newsletters, and speeches; and small businesses, many working with the government or hoping to soon, for whom we write and edit marketing material, proposals, capabilities statements, reports, web content, and speeches.  That said, we have written and edited party invitations, church newsletters, political flyers, holiday letters, resumes, adventure novels, and directions on what to pack in your Brownie’s lunch for the field trip.  You can see a list of our products, described in amusing detail, on our website.

                We love to write – and even more to edit; we specialize in making our clever, creative, and committed clients sound as clever, creative, and committed as they are.  We believe that every organization has a unique voice (or at least the ones who have been smart enough to hire us so far do); we help our clients, not just find that voice, but develop and project it. 

                We have all sorts of plans for this blog, but mostly it lets us write and practice our own voice.  As Active Voice’s founder, president, grand poobah, and cranky old writer (COW, for all you DoD acronym lovers), I will be a regular contributor as will the other 50% of our full time staff, also named Kate, our director of operations, writer, editor, vice president in charge of remembering when things are due, webmaster, and official cool young person (OCYP).  We hope to also include entries from our many part-time writers and pundits.  And we encourage any loyal readers (not sure who that would be since my mom hasn’t figured out how to post to blogs yet) to comment as well.

                We’ll be posting about the tremendous things our clients have done or are doing and tips for small businesses trying to work with the feds.  We’ll put up reports on conferences we attend, books we read, and writers we love or hate.  And we’ll talk about Active Voice: how we are trying to make it with a business model that allows us to do what we do best (write), for organizations in which we believe (our clients), from places we enjoy (all over), around people we love (our families and friends), and with enough success that we can give back to the causes we support (a long list).

                In future posts, Kate and I will introduce ourselves, our clients, and our and their work in more detail.  Please follow us on twitter, like us on Facebook, check out our website, or come up to us on the bus to chat. I promise more meat and less self-promotion in future posts (and maybe some recipes too).

(Old) Kate