Seeing Things Anew

Taking a different approach

A tweaked approach

We’re still adjusting the weekly missives, and I think I’ve hit upon a format that will be useful to regular readers. We’ll try it out this week—feel welcome to let me know what you think. I’m not going to make an ironclad guarantee since too many people in my household have veto power over my plans, but I think generally each week, we will have three sections in our community newsletter.

• “Echoes of Inquiry” in which I dig into something that has been on my mind, usually an attempt to see things we take for granted in a fresh way.

• “Passages and Pathways” in which I share a brief news update, mostly about what’s happening with my writing and speaking.

• “Reading Reflections” in which I offer a recommendation on someone else’s book—could be fiction, could be nonfiction, but a book that I believe will enhance your life in some way.

Let’s start that this week.

Echoes of Inquiry

Light up the Sky

Like several hundred million people, I could see the Northern Lights last night for (as far as I can remember) the first time. From what I understand, that was likely my only opportunity. News reports prior to last night led me to believe we might live too far south to be able to see it, although some reports said it would be visible as far south as Florida (we live in Tennessee). Plus, we’ve had severe storms the last couple of days, so I thought cloud cover might scuttle the opportunity.

My son and I went outside at about 11:30 PM and looked to the north. At first I could discern nothing except what I thought was the glow of a nearby city. As our eyes adjusted, I could make out a pinkish tinge close to the horizon.

“Is that it?” I thought. “Maybe we just have the edge of it. Oh, well.”

I Facetimed the scene for my partially disabled wife, who could make out a little color just above the treeline, then prepared to come inside. On a whim, I opened the camera app on my phone and once again pointed it to the sky….

Wow! That almost looks like the sky in the New York Times article from Brunswick, Maine.

I panned the camera around a bit to find out what else it could see.

Stunning. I think the smart camera could automatically adjust exposure to help me see more than I could see with the naked eye.

I tried to use the panoramic setting, but it looked the same as it did to my unaided eye. Same thing with video, and with Facetime. The enhanced view only popped out with the Photo setting (and the flash turned off).

All sorts of thoughts come to me around this experience, enough that could actually lead to a book, or at least a portion of a book. I’ll just dig into one aspect here.

We live in the middle of yet another technological revolution. People have understandable concerns about Artificial Intelligence (a misnomer, but that’s for another column). They had concerns about the Internet. They had concerns about the printing press. They had concerns about widespread literacy and writing abilities (vs. memorizing). For clarity: the concerns were justified. Just take the writing abilities example. People used to be able to memorize word for word huge chunks of works such as produced by Homer. These days we can barely remember a phone number. The ability to write things down certainly changed the way we use our brains. But it also gave us tremendous additional capacity.

We are going through another such revolution with AI, and we don’t yet know what will come out of it. It has potential to ruin us, as did each of those previous technological revolutions. I think, though, we more likely will harness it the way we did all those others. If we handle it right, our technology doesn’t replace us. It enhances us. After all, my eyeglasses help me see what I otherwise could not, and nobody fears glasses.

It’s not the technology. It’s what we do with the technology. For me, its greatest use is not in seeing new things, but in seeing things anew.

Did you see the Northern Lights? Comment and let me know your experience.

Passages and Pathways

Taking a Breath

As regular readers know, I retired from a 40-year college teaching career recently. Technically, it doesn’t happen until the end of July, but I have only one class left to teach this summer via Zoom. The college has already turned off my purchasing account, and I’ll be clearing my office out in the next three or four weeks. So I’m in process. We have a lot of things to deal with in making this change, of course, but one positive aspect (among others) is that I have more time for writing already. This newsletter is part of that, but more significantly: a new character has popped up in developing Real Speak, the third book in The Sparklight Chronicles. He is forcing some new plot lines, and since the book, like the others, is a business parable, I have to think about how that affects the “principles” part of the book. I can’t ignore him, though. We will see how it comes out

.In any case, I’m not yet fully back to full-time writing. I’m easing into that. But I have three books in progress all at the same time, so more good stuff is coming over the next year, God willing.

Reading Reflections

So Many Books, So Little Time

Image by Marisa Sias from Pixabay

The difficulty lies in deciding which book to recommend this week. I’m one of those readers who engages multiple books at the same time, and I have several that I want to share with you. I will try to discipline myself.

This week I want to commend to you a series of books, written by Vince Vawter. He wrote a trilogy called “The Paperboy Trilogy” based on his own experiences growing up. He begins with the Newbery award-winning Paperboy about Victor Vollmer, known as “Little Man,” and his struggles as an 11-year-old dealing with stuttering. The story continues in Copyboy with Victor as a 17-year-old continuing to deal with his stutter while also learning to deal with the much larger world. The trilogy concludes with Manboy and Victor at 21, navigating not only the throes of adulthood and relationships, but also working at a newspaper in Memphis at the time of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

These are all semi-autobiographical. Vince served in a 40-year newspaper career, starting as a sportswriter and rising up through the journalistic ranks to become news editor of the Memphis Press-Scimitar (sadly no longer in print), managing editor of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, and president and publisher of the Evansville Courier & Press. He has lived with a stutter his whole life, and the events of his books come from his life.

The style of writing in each book evolves to reflect the growth of Victor as we follow him through his development. You will enjoy Vince’s writing abilities, the plots, and the insights on human nature, history, and personal struggle.

If you dig into Vince’s writing, come back here and comment.

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Donn King is The Confidence Cultivator. He is the author of The Sparklight Chronicles series of business parables (DonnKing.com/Books) and a professor of communication studies (which means “a professor of standing up in front of people and saying stuff”). He’s also a pastor, a speaker, and a communication coach. Reach out to donn@donnking.com to see how he could help you increase your impact, gain influence, and build your career.

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