Interruption

Noisy garbage truck  
Driving over cobblestones  
Leaves a trail of smells.

Never cease to wonder

Helmut asks Maria, just hours before she dies, whether the priest had come to give her the last rites. Maria nods. Then she says drily, "Nothing to write home about."  

This was one of many anecdotes I heard while attending Maria's Apple Fest.

#booksIlove: Circe

Title: Circe, by Madeline Miller
First time I read the book: 2026

  
After rereading the trilogy of the Women of Troy by Pat Barker and watching the Odyssey movie, I tripped onto this book along the way. Miller's use of language in telling Circe's story makes the character sing. She brings to life the lore of Greek Gods in a way I haven't experienced before. Masterful.

I like the fact that the gods are so very poorly behaved, not just because they act like spoilt kids who have never grown up, but because their all-reaching power inhibits any sophisticated thoughts from taking place.   

On the way to Hamburg

Short expedition 
Train ride through autumn landscape 
My mind wanders far.

A perfect solution

Sometimes life gives you a hint about how to rethink the problem. In Hamburg's central library, there is a bubblegum machine with capsules of earplugs. It is such a playful way of saying, "If you are troubled by people talking... here is the solution." No more necessity for tight-lipped shushing.

 
In Grenada there was a mechanic, Tony, down the road from where Pat and Dave lived. Pat complained that the back trunk was always filled with water. There was some leak in the door of the trunk. Dave went off and asked Tony if he could fix the leak. The fellow went and got a drill and then proceeded to drill some holes where the water gathered, thus freeing the truck of water. You've got to love this. Tony saw a different problem than Dave did, and his solution was faster and smarter.

Making room for what comes next

I think it might be time to overhaul my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn and Substack are the only two social media sites I am part of, and it has been more than a year since I looked properly at my About section. So much has happened since then that I barely recognise my day-to-day life in what is written there.

Case in point: my LinkedIn header currently reads,

“Consultant, Content Developer & Agile Facilitator | Committed Creative | Early Tech Pioneer | Learning Strategist.”

That described me rather well until recently. Now that I am writing my book, Old Lady At Sea, while simultaneously learning everything I need to know about independent publishing, the only part of that header I still identify with is “Committed Creative.” The rest feels increasingly like something from a past life.

So the question I am musing over is this: when do I erase all those other versions of myself from my profile? What would happen if I replaced that handful of string beans with

“Committed Creative | Manufacturer of Yet Unpublished Manuscripts”?

Or, even better,

“Committed Creative | Aspiring Author of Bestsellers”?

Would this result in an avalanche of people pressing the unfollow button, or could I convince at least some of you to stay along for the ride?

Because one thing is becoming clear. I will probably not be writing very much in the future about the subjects I used to write about. For years I wrote from knowledge I had accumulated in learning and development, facilitation, leadership, agile ways of working, communication and careers. I knew something about those subjects. Now I am moving into different territory.

Instead of writing about things I already know, I increasingly want to write about things I am experiencing while I am still trying to understand them. What is it like to change the direction of a career late in life? What happens when you become a beginner again? How do you take skills accumulated over decades and use them in a completely different field, and how do you know whether you are succeeding?

Perhaps rewriting my profile starts with rewriting my definition of success. If you glance at my work experience, it becomes apparent that I have become quite nimble at changing careers. Not simply changing jobs, but changing industries, learning new skills and finding ways to make old ones useful again. I have been a ballet dancer, engineer, technical trainer, university researcher, learning and development professional, facilitator, consultant and writer.

Becoming an author is another turn, and it turns out that creativity and pragmatism have to live side by side. Pragmatically, success does not mean becoming a bestselling author. That would be lovely, of course, but it is hardly a sensible working definition. Broadly speaking success means not spending a ridiculous amount of money getting my book published, producing a book whose look and feel bring me delight, and developing a marketing strategy that boosts my energy rather than drains it.

It also means publishing the book in different formats and, perhaps eventually, in different languages. I would like people to be able to find it online and in bookstores. That in itself feels like a fairly tall order. Creative success, though, is a whole other kettle of fish.

For me, creative success starts with sustaining my writing practice. I am ferociously dedicated when I am in the flow and almost incapable of sitting still and concentrating when something becomes a task I “must do.” That is where the messiness and chaos come in. Success is not making those patterns disappear but learning how to handle them with a kind of tender sternness, tough love directed at myself.

Then there are the people I work with. Finding the right people has always been one of my superpowers. Finding just the right people to build working relationships founded on mutual respect, generosity, curiosity and a willingness to question something and start again. My working life has been blessed with people like that, and some of them are already part of my life as an author. Others I have yet to meet.

A creative life, I am discovering, is populated by people who cheer you on and by those whose critical eyes show you how to make the work better. Both are necessary. Encouragement keeps you going, but thoughtful criticism helps you grow. I have been fortunate to find people who can do both.

Then comes the part I find much harder: finding readers. I am a functional introvert at the best of times, and even that has become more pronounced in recent years. Messages such as “put yourself out there”, “sell yourself and you will sell your book”, or “here’s how to make 10K a month as an author” send shivers down my spine. Not in a good way.

I know I need to find ways of using social media and online channels to connect with readers, but at the moment much of it still feels overwhelming. So I research, I watch and I experiment. Perhaps that is another thing I can write about. Not how to become a successful author, because I certainly do not know that yet, but what it feels like to try.

I can write about being a beginner again and trying to distinguish useful advice from noise. I can write about finding ways to promote a book without turning myself into a product. I can write about the strange mixture of confidence and uncertainty involved in doing something new when you already have a lifetime of experience behind you. That, perhaps, is where my old work and my new work meet.

And then there is the most important definition of success: writing more books. Fortunately, I have been writing about my next book, Growing Up & Growing Old, for more than ten years already. Sometime before I launch Old Lady At Sea, I suspect I will begin working on that again. Collecting all the pieces I have written on the topic, transcribing the interviews I have done with friends, and figuring out a framework for the book. After this, there sits a whole slew of other things I have written and placed on the back shelf over the years.

Knowing all this work already exists in some form gives me buoyancy. Some of the manuscripts will definitely need to be rewritten, some may never see the light of day, and others may surprise me. So perhaps my LinkedIn profile really does need changing. Not because everything I did before has disappeared, but because all of it is feeding what comes next.

The direction has changed and so has what I want to write about. Less about what I already know, and more about what I am discovering as I go. That feels like a more accurate description of where I am now. Please stay around for a while longer. I promise my journey, if not informative, will be entertaining.

Back to the gym

Shoulders tense with strain
Heavy weights don't want to budge
Can't wait for the end.

Beautiful sounds: a child laughing

Dinner is calling her through the grumble in her stomach. Feed me. Feed me. Rush home. All of a sudden the afternoon spent at the playground seems less exciting. Her energy is spent. Laughing, she runs barefoot over the grass, leaving her sandal behind under the part bench, for me to find the next morning.

Slow work, small victories

Two weeks ago, while sitting in My Chair at the central library in Hamburg, I penned the last words of my book, Old Lady At Sea. The first draft. Some might not even mention this event, yet in my heart I celebrated this as a small victory. I called up my husband and told him the news, almost feeling embarrassed for making a mountain out of a molehill. But that was the Old Me, the girl who had been taught not to take up space and to remain small. The Old Lady in me thinks differently now. I want to pause along the journey of writing this book and reflect on what I am learning about myself as a writer.

Sure, it’s early days, but now the first draft is finished, I’m confident about seeing the book through to being published. I’m no longer looking at a big block of stone with a chisel in hand. The form of the book is sculpted and now needs polishing.

Though polishing isn’t quite the word I am looking for because a first draft, no matter how good it is, will need considerable rework. But you know what I mean. All the ideas I had swirling around in my head this last year have found their way to paper. I’ve had to stretch my imagination, dampen down my ambitions to finish quickly, and embrace the slow, plodding pace of how I write best.

Slow and steady. Four or five hours a day on average. I can do more if I include making corrections to the manuscript, as well as less when ideas fizzle out. Generally, I do a large chunk of writing in the morning, with a second short burst in the late afternoon. It has been so much fun to figure out this daily rhythm. After nearly fifty years of dancing to some piper’s tune, this freedom to play my own song has been exciting.

Learning what my natural pace is as a writer has been so different from the pace I followed as a content writer. Then I always had to accommodate this pace to a predefined timeline.

That is not to say writing the first draft has been easy. I’ve been riddled with uncertainty, anxiety, and impatience most of the time. Admittedly, there were a few occasions in the last months when words flowed with such speed that it took my breath away. But in truth, writing anything has always been a messy affair. Deep down, though, this state of persistent confusion which visits me when I write does not faze me. As someone who used to be a ballet dancer, I understand the importance of showing up, doing the work. I believe that the discomfort of creativity needs embracing if I wish to transform it into something real.

A first draft is certainly not a finished book. It is, though, everything I need to make it into a book. Along the way, I have had the support of an AI writing coach to catch me when I took a skinny-dip into a pool of self-doubt, or prod me in the right direction when I was trying to structure the storylines. Equally, no… more importantly, I had the support of a dear friend who has been editing the book as I have been writing. She’s sublimely meticulous about grammar, flow, and rhythm. Someone I can trust implicitly to make all needed changes without throwing out the rough gems. Her comments have been immensely helpful, all the while making me believe this is a book others might enjoy reading.

Now I’m sending out the manuscript to a handful of friends who have offered to be beta readers. I’m trying to figure out how I want to handle their feedback. I’ve sought advice from two author friends of mine. Both of them said the same thing: take what is useful, reject the rest, and develop a thick skin. The latter advice seems pretty impossible at this stage in my life. Even though I’ve been told that I take criticism well, that really is only on the surface. My tendency to overthink will not serve me if I am inundated with comments, no matter how well-meaning they are. Or even worse, no comments at all, which will also be hard to process.

I’m playing with the idea of getting my AI writing coach to aggregate all their comments into an Excel table. “Easy fix” would be comments concerning consistency or terminology. “Broad sweep” suggestions that will bring more depth and breadth to the work. “Must-haves” things that are missing or need more detail. And finally, “Nice-to-have” a list of suggestions that I could, would, should see to if there’s time.

One step at a time. First, I have to rewrite the last chapter and make all the changes the editor made to part four of the book. Once that is done and sent off to the beta readers. Only then can I start experimenting with how to process their responses. It’s wonderful to have time to do this. No deadlines. No client breathing down my neck to rush this phase of the project.

Once that is finished, I will send it to another friend for editing, then another round of beta readers. I’m considering hiring a copy and line editor after that and, once the layout is done, having a final read by a proofreader. Which makes this victory round at finishing the first draft seem preposterously premature. Well, think what you may, in my world this moment feels worth celebrating.

On my way to the Trave

Man plays a guitar
Alone, under an archway
Music echoing.

Flights of fancy

Have you ever noticed that some of the happiest moments occur unexpectedly, when the sun shimmers off the tips of waves, as the birds fly by, and you tear up at how perfect the moment is? And then it disappears.

Sitting in a waiting room

Woman reads a book
Moving her head back and forth
Her eyes get a rest.

Checker'd past

He sat in the groom's family pew at the front of the church. His ex-wife at one end. He at another. The ceremony was waiting for the priest to arrive, while the guests hovered at the back, jubilant to see old schoolmates now they were all grown up and looking fancy. Light shone from their faces, having shed the brittle skin of their bedraggled youthful (mis-)adventures and transformed into these full-fledged adults. 

 
The groom's father stares ahead at the empty altar. The slab of marble; a woven cloth lies across its length.
The bible closed on its metal podium. The crucifix hangs between two stain glass window. 

He avoids looking at his son surrounded by his university friends, chatting about last night's game, or the hiking trip they are planning to take next year in Scotland, or could the groom be actually talking about how nervous he is and how happy he is that they  
are all there. The father turns his gaze back to altar. Wondering whether the closed bible is a metaphor for this moment of estrangement. 

He might have received an invitation to attend the wedding, but he wasn't a part of the celebration. 

Temporal lobe

so long as I could think,
the world shifted and
shaked and was curly.
past is supposed to disappear
but sometimes it gets stuck.
what I hope to be my
future is something that
slips invisible through
my closed fingers like sand.
why am I running instead
of waiting in joyful
anticipation? heart thumping.
mind empty. one more
deep intake of hopefulness.
one release of all that is
messing with my brain.
clear-eyed, strong-willed,
ideas sparkle so bright.

On the path

The sun is shinning, so she goes to the kitchen and picks up bits and pieces out of her refrigerator and packs them into some tupperware containers.

Cutting the carrots into thin sticks. Trying to find a peeler that is sharp enough that it will only take away a thin layer. The same with the cucumber. She cuts the center away with all of the seed, making sticks out of the meaty part of the cucumber and its rind. Then comes an apple cut into thin slices.

It's been years since she ate an apple by chomping down on a whole apple and munching like a beaver, down to its core. Instead, she likes the nibbling
on slices breaking delicately under her front teeth.

After she places all the carrots, cucumber, and apple in their containers, she squirts some fresh lemon juice over them to keep them fresh. Preventing the apple slices from going brown.

She takes two packages of saltine crackers, along with the Tupperware, and places them in a square bag she bought years ago at the summer flea market. There is a pouch inside with plastic cutlery, and two slits to put ice packs to keep everything cool.

Armed with her picnic bag, an old blanket and two towels, she gets on her bicycle and rides into the day.

Sandstorm

I feel such disappointment at my well of ideas going dry. The snippings of colour blurring through dirty lenses of my glass because I keep rubbing my eyes. Frustration, a crust that I pick at, tearing away with my fingernails, until it falls to the wayside. Leaving small drops of blood on top of the tender pink skin. Without knowing, I let out a loud sigh. You say, "Is anything wrong?" I respond, "No. Nothing."

#bookIlove : Angela's Ashes

Title: Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
First time I read the book: when it was first published in 1996

Pat was always perplexed about how a relatively small country like Ireland could produce such a wealth of authors. Many of her favourite novelists were Irish.

Claudia was also a big fan of Irish authors and really enjoyed bleak works of squalor. She was the person who brought Angela's Ashes into my life. Sara was still more or less a baby, so my hormones were spiking every which way when I read it.

Even though I could hardly stand reading Frank McCourt's childhood memoir, also referred to as a misery memoir and a tragiccomic memoir, I could not put his book down. His prose was breathtaking. The stories he tells of his mother are heart-wrenchingly sad, poignant, and a true lesson of resilience.

At the same time, the poverty and suffering he and his siblings experienced principally at the hand of his alcoholic father made me so angry. Not only at his father, sometimes at his mother, neighbours, and the world in general. The fates had dealt him such arduous, impossible tasks to surmount, such that no child should face.

McCourt speaks of these horrors with such tenderness and grace; even today, when writing this, my eyes tear.

One more note: McCourt wrote this novel, his first, when he was sixty-six years old! You can't imagine how inspiring this is. He continued to write throughout his seventies as well. So there!

The future is now

Years ago, maybe a little over twenty-two years ago, I was working as a university researcher in the field of interactive and multimedia systems. In particular, I worked for seven years on a project where we explored how to use technology in creative and constructive ways in K–12 education. It was what I called my Black Forest cake in my career; delicious and joyful.

I have been reflecting on the work we did, and adults are once again being asked to guide young people through a technology they are still learning to understand themselves. Looking back over the years I spent researching how internet technologies could be used constructively in schools, I have been struck by how many of the challenges we encountered then are reappearing today in a different form. The technologies have changed. Human nature has not.

During those years, we worked together with students and teachers, finding ways to enhance the students’ learning with the help of internet technologies and multimedia systems. I don’t really want to write about what we did, but rather about a few of the truths we discovered concerning who benefited from participating in our projects, and whether these findings might also be pertinent to the current situation of AI in schools.

I’d like to address three main learnings.

The first is that the students who benefited, meaning those who showed an increase in their engagement and confidence, were not necessarily those in the top percentile. Those students performed well and showed only a marginal increase in engagement compared with when they were having standard classes. Neither did the students in the bottom percentile show a significant increase in terms of performance. In both cases, the results were probably due to the novelty of using technology in creative ways to learn topics in their curriculum.

No, the students who benefited the most were those hovering slightly above and below the average. We researched why this was and came up with various theories. The one that struck me most had to do with the allocation of responsibility and the transparency of outputs.

When we started a project, the class would be separated into various teams. In each team, there were those who had to document the progress of the project, those who helped create the end results, and one or two who were responsible for the technology. The latter were also responsible for teaching the other students how to use the hardware and software properly.

I had a few university IT students who came with me into the classes, and we taught the “techies” and gave them clear guidelines about how to care for the devices. Then we saw to it that they were able to help their team members use the devices or software properly.

We would nearly always choose those students as our techies who were underperforming, had high absenteeism, or were somewhat introverted. Not the troublemakers, but those who were at risk of falling behind. We did not elevate them to the top of the castle; rather, we made them realise that the other students, and we in the research party, needed their support. They were the ones the other students called if they were stuck with a problem. They were also responsible for doing backups of data and collecting all the devices and handing them over to us after every work session.

In the months we worked with them, it was possible to see them grow, both outwardly and inwardly. The data we collected only confirmed what we saw happening before our eyes. In two cases, teachers told me how students who had been close to dropping out decided to finish school and go on to university because, as they put it, they didn’t know learning could be fun.

Looking back, I think this has implications for how we introduce AI into classrooms. When students were given meaningful responsibility within a team, particularly responsibility that other students depended upon, many who were quietly drifting through school began to flourish. Responsibility transformed identity in ways that grades alone rarely could. AI may become another opportunity to rethink not simply what students learn, but the roles they are invited to play while learning.

The second aspect I noticed was that students, of any age, were not particularly concerned when things went wrong with the technology, and they were patient in learning how to use a piece of software or hardware so that they got their desired results. In one Grade 6 project, where children were learning about metamorphosis (biology) by creating stop-motion animation films (art), they patiently took twenty shots for each second of their five-minute movie. There was one poor student who had to sit motionless against the trunk of a tree while he metamorphosed into a mound of dirt, moss, and twigs.

Throughout the span of those projects, over all those years, we sometimes heard, “This is hard,” but we never heard, “This is too hard.” Over and over again, I would observe some techie explain how some software worked, amazed at how the other students didn’t balk at the lengthy explanation and endless, “Click here. Then here. Then here. Then here...” Unfortunately, this could not be said of most of the teachers we worked with.

Children often approach unfamiliar technology with curiosity before judgement. They expect to experiment, make mistakes, and gradually improve. That doesn’t mean they should unquestioningly trust everything technology produces. Quite the opposite. It means they are usually willing to persist long enough to discover both its possibilities and its limitations. That willingness to explore without expecting immediate mastery may be one of the most valuable attitudes we can preserve as AI enters education.

Which brings me to the third thing I observed over those years of doing research. The greatest challenge, however, wasn’t technical. It was psychological.

In many instances, it was the teachers who struggled most with learning the technology, not the students. This was at a time when the use of internet technology in schools was only just beginning. When we collected data on the teachers, very few used internet technologies either privately or professionally.

When we approached the teachers about doing projects, they were often curious and open-minded. They were excited for their students. It took them a moment when we told them the students would be teaching each other how to use the technology rather than being taught by the teachers. We always had one-on-one sessions with the teachers as well, which often took much longer than it did for the students to learn.

In my experience, this had to do with two automatic responses that would trip them up. These were, “I’ll never be able to remember this,” when we were giving step-by-step instructions, and, “Why is it so complicated?” when outlining how the students would integrate the technology. This discomfort and internal resistance was prevalent among nearly all the teachers we worked with, regardless of age or the subjects they taught.

In essence, we were devising a situation where students, the ultimate learners, were having to teach each other how to use the technology. At the same time, we were putting teachers, masters at teaching, in the precarious position of being learners.

The shift from teacher to learner was disconcerting. Whereas the students dealt with software glitches or technical failures as part of the learning process, the teachers often felt they were doing something wrong or that the technology itself was inadequate whenever errors occurred.

Our job was often helping teachers see that fixing what goes wrong was part of learning. Instead of expecting everything to work all the time perfectly, we asked them whether they could see technical problems as opportunities for problem-solving. The moment they noticed how unperturbed their students were when things went wrong, and that the students didn’t expect their teacher to fix everything, the teachers themselves began learning how to learn in a way they had not anticipated.

This is not to say the students became the teachers. Rather, by observing their students, the teachers were able to turn inward and reflect upon their own ability—or inability—to deal with uncertainty. This often came with the realisation that much of their professional energy was focused on becoming better teachers, but far less on remaining active learners themselves.

I don’t believe the teachers struggled because they lacked ability. They struggled because they cared. They were accustomed to standing in front of a classroom feeling responsible for having answers. Suddenly they found themselves learning in public alongside their students. That is an uncomfortable position for anyone, regardless of experience.

Generative AI introduces questions our multimedia projects never faced: hallucinated answers, bias, authorship, privacy, and the temptation to substitute generated responses for genuine understanding. Those issues deserve careful attention. Yet they do not remove the central challenge we observed all those years ago. They reinforce it. Adults will once again have to model what it means to be thoughtful learners while guiding young people through unfamiliar territory.

This is a long detour to arrive at the point I want to make. When it comes to AI, leaders, teachers, and parents cannot wait until they feel completely confident before inviting young people to engage with it. Learning and teaching will have to happen simultaneously. We do not have the luxury of figuring everything out and fixing every glitch before students encounter the technology. What we can do is cultivate curiosity, critical thinking, and a willingness to experiment while remaining rigorous in evaluating what AI can and cannot do.

We know AI will change the landscape of learning in the future. What is discomforting to many is that the future is now.

---

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Picking up the trash

Watermelon rind
Swan feathers shed in passing
Early morning walk.

Days before summer vacation

It's a hot summer day, and the train compartment is stuffed with a swarm of teenagers on their way to the Baltic Sea. A day trip away from their sad, stuffy schoolroom, their teachers sitting in another compartment, their backpacks filled to the brim with every conceivable snack. More glittering wrappers than substance.

They squeeze into the compartment, girls sitting on each other's laps. Boys, still small and scrawny, sit four side by side where usually only two would fit. The girls act up, shrill screams of laughter, seemingly unstoppable, fuelled by whispered secrets and stolen glances at the boys. One girl laughs so hard her head flies back and hits the window. More explosive laughter ensues.

The boys' heads are together, watching a video on one guy's phone. They watch it over and over again, groaning at the same missed goal. They talk earnestly about the finer points of the football game, as if they have personally been privileged to hear the trainer talking to the players.

Outwardly, they seem oblivious to the girls' chatter and laughter. Yet eventually, they succumb to the continual onslaught of provocations. One of the boys pulls out three large boxes of Mon Chéri chocolates. He hands one to the group of girls, another to the guys sitting across from him, and the last to his best buddy beside him.

One of the group members leaves the compartment to make sure the teachers are not coming. 

Quickly, they puncture each chocolate, drain the horrible alcohol from its filling, and toss the rest into the small rubbish bins next to their seats. The girls begin to talk louder. Their antics become more uncontrolled. The boys are drawn into the merriment. Someone turns on head-bouncing music. A party is born.

A little girl sits in the corner seat with her older brother and mother. She stares at the teenagers with wide eyes and an iron-rod-straight back. Mesmerised, she cannot stop watching the girls. When the music starts playing, she begins to cry and pleads with her mother to leave.
Her mother asks her son to look after the luggage and takes her daughter into the corridor. 

They wander along, looking for a compartment that is less loud, less scary. There is none to be found.

Talking to her daughter, she tries to reassure her that it won't be long before they reach their stop.

She asks her dearest daughter what is bothering her. The noise? The loud laughter? The music? Sobbing, the little girl bursts out that she doesn't want to be a teenager. She wants to stay a little girl forever. She doesn't want to have to behave like those in their compartment.

Her mother scoops her into a warm embrace, saying that not all teenagers behave like that. No matter what happens, she can behave any way she wants when she's a teenager.

Something about the way her mother says this soothes the girl's fears. She wipes away her tears. Together, holding hands, the two return to where her brother sits reading his comic book, oblivious to the drama swirling around him.

A sad history of houseplants

There was a time when everyone filled their apartments with houseplants. For most of us, buying a new houseplant was a downward slide, showing us how little green our thumbs were. Some were better and managed to keep them alive. Claudia was one of those. 

Her apartment was a jungle of hanging pots with plants draped over them, vines crawling up and over bookshelves, and beasts of unruly rubber plants crowding the corners of her living room. Plants were her companions. They were not necessarily pretty or decorative, more a jumbled, overgrown mass of green.

Whereas, any plants I bought quickly went from store-bought lush to shrivelling victims of neglect in a very short breath of time. Their decline made me feel very inadequate. Those needing water thirsted. Those that didn't need watering drowned. Then there was always the one plant that grew and grew, with a twisting stem and a pathetic, small amount of leaves.

Claudia always bought me plants for my birthday. I could never figure out if she did this with a touch of wickedness, knowing my dread of plants, or if it was a case of hope springs eternal. She never gave up. Whenever I got a new plant, I'd throw away the most miserable one. And for some weeks, or months, the new plant would stand there boldly amongst the scruff.

Yet in the end, they all succumbed and ended up atop a compost heap.

Sometime after Claudia died, I got rid of all our houseplants. They were both victims and witnesses to my grief. I treasured the books she brought into my life, reading them with joyful sadness and feeling her loss, but I could not bear seeing one more plant die before my eyes. It took me seven years to buy a new houseplant.

I put it in the living room by itself and made a pact. I told myself that if I could keep it alive for one year, I'd find it some friends. Now, nearly two years down the line, four plants are residing in our living room, looking happy and healthy. 

I just might buy one more, as if it were a gift from Claudia, on my next birthday.

+++++++++++

Photo by Kate Darmody on Unsplash

Witnesses of silence

Books on my bookshelves
A collection of time spent
Not talking a word.

Looking out on cornfields

Prompt:

"The corn was head high, rustling its heavy, dusty leaves, and for a while anyway it had nothing to do with her."

Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

She hides in the attic amongst discarded pieces of broken furniture. Too precious to burn. No longer deemed worthy of fixing. Instead, they gather dust on their wooden surfaces, the grim and rust in their joints leave stains on her shirt and shorts as she crawls to the round window open at the gable of the roof. A cool breeze dries the pearls of sweat on her forehead. 

Sinking into cushions, she forms a makeshift fort, grasping the softest one, its floral pattern faded by sunlight, and hugging it close to her chest. Pushing down, trying to stave off the waves of disappointment and hurt building up inside of her. Her mother's categorical no still echoes in her ears. Her one chance of escape shattered.

  
Now there is nothing to do but wait and watch each day pass by in repetition of nothingness. She swallows the bitterness, choking. Tears begin to fall. 

History

I used to go to Würzburg to the Benedictine monastery to learn Tai Chi.

A Chinese Catholic priest from Barcelona came to teach. He told us the story of escaping China with Catholic missionaries when their lives were threatened by the Red Army.

Thirty years later, he returned to visit his sister, his only living relative. He said that, instead of recounting the details of their struggles, they sat together in silence, knowing that their suffering was too deep to put into words. 

Still not there yet

What little I know about forgiveness has been milked from shrivelled memories. Some say it is possible to forgive, yet not forget. I'm not so sure of that. Forgiveness happens so slowly because it needs constant nourishment given from happiness and joyfulness. How is that going to happen if I cannot forget the hurtful deeds, the unkind criticisms, or wrongful decisions? Holding tight to those memories makes it impossible for anything other to surface.

I worry that I will pass on my suffering to my children and my life partner. There is so much child-like, childish hurt bottled up inside of me that I put on a shelf in my subconscious. Only on days like today do I take it out and polish the glass sides, checking whether the seal is still air-tight.

Deep inside, I hope the hurt will miraculously evaporate, leaving an ether of forgiveness that permeates the walls of my heart.

They are no longer here. Surely it is time to let the hurt die as well. For no one deserves to be measured only by their mistakes, inadequacies, or their worst deeds. I yearn to put those to rest. I want to love them again, as I did as a child, before the suffering began.

My AI writing coach

Last week, I sent the manuscript of the first twenty-two of twenty-seven chapters of my memoir to an editor. It is what I hope will prove to be a good first draft. The editor is someone I trust to do a thorough line edit as well as provide creative feedback.

What surprised me most was not that I had finished twenty-two chapters. It was that this was probably the strongest first draft I have written in all my years as a content developer. Granted, writing a memoir is another kettle of fish, and I still have to hear back from the editor; they might see it otherwise.

What I am anxious to find out is whether working with an AI writing coach has truly paid off in this initial phase, as far as the quality of output. What is indisputable is that the experience of using an agent changed how I approached my writing. I had more time to write and less time to brood.

After reading Dr. Philippa Hartman’s article, The “Cognitive Offloading” Paradox, I was fascinated to discover that many of the ways I had instinctively been working with AI closely matched what she describes as “committed, strategic offloading,” a predictor of positive, even transformative learning.

Hartman discusses six principles to follow.

Principle 1: Offload to AI substantially, or not at all.

When it comes to writing, up until now, I have used ChatGPT, together with Grammarly and Claude, to edit my spelling and grammar.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to give ChatGPT more complicated editing tasks to do, but found this dissatisfying. This is partially because the AI tools introduced certain language patterns I don’t like at all, such as em dashes, one-sentence paragraphs, and an overuse of adjectives. As well, at the Pro project level, ChatGPT only seemed able to process tasks involving documents up to ten pages long. If, for instance, I asked it to remove the time lines and clean up the text of a podcast transcript longer than fifteen pages, the results were suboptimal: missing sections, cut-off sentences, and hallucinations. Any discussion with ChatGPT about how to alter my prompts to achieve consistently reliable results failed.

Admittedly, the problem might have been on my side, but I didn’t want to spend more time trying to get the model to produce better outcomes. I also didn’t want to run the risk of my book reading as though AI had stomped all over it, leaving the language flat and the imagery matted. I found two friends with the required expertise to do the editing. Human writing for human readers.

Having dyslexia meant I still relied on Grammarly as a spell checker.

The one area I was excited to work with AI was as a writing coach. This is the first time I have written a book, and I needed guidance. After taking numerous online courses in creative nonfiction writing, I felt more confused than motivated. I needed a writing coach to help me with structure and form. Fortunately, a good friend worked with me and programmed an AI agent as a writing coach.

Principle 2: Frame AI as a partner, not a tool.

My writing coach was not so much a partner as an informed expert, possessing a skill set I needed. I’ve probably read dozens and dozens of memoirs in my life, some of them among my favourites, but I knew nothing about what makes a memoir engaging and appealing to today’s readers. For this, I needed feedback from someone or something that could review my work from a publisher’s perspective, and also had the ability to support my writing process without creative intrusion.

What I was seeking was a coach who would listen to my questions and answer them with specificity. I was also hoping the coach could help me distance myself from what I was writing, so that I could make changes out of conviction that they would add cohesiveness and clarity, rather than out of desperation or insecurity.

The final selling point was the ability to converse with this coach about anything that came to mind, and at times convenient for me. I didn’t need to feel beholden to this coach, nor was I concerned about testing the boundaries of the relationship. This freedom of when, where, and what of our so-called partnership was joyful.

Principle 3: Build verification into the workflow, not the preamble.

One of the core tasks I assigned the coach to do was to analyse each chapter for what was working, what needed improvement, and what was missing. The book has four parts with varying numbers of chapters, so I asked the agent to make sure each chapter supported the central theme of its respective part and that each part was identifiable from the others.

The coach would write an analysis of what worked and what didn’t in the version I submitted of each chapter. As I read through the response, I registered whether I “liked” what was being said or not. Everything I liked went into a “maybe true” bucket. I didn’t feel I could necessarily trust the positive comments as being true, but neither could I dismiss them. I gave myself permission to let them stand for the moment. It was reassuring to hear these comments and soothed my doubts, which enabled me to continue writing with momentum.

Then there was the feedback I didn’t like reading. This tended to fall into two other buckets. The first was the “whatever” bucket. These were nice-to-have suggestions, but not for this round of revisions. Advice about how I could build an even higher sandcastle. Things that would take too much time and not substantially improve the current version.

There were also comments so unhelpful that I questioned the feasibility of continuing to use the AI coach. I treated these as anomalies and discarded them almost immediately.

Then there were comments or ideas I didn’t like or were resistant to, but that provoked a response that made me want to explore them further. One suggestion was that I move an entire chapter to a different part of the book. My immediate reaction was, “Absolutely not.” Two days later, I realised the suggestion exposed a weakness in the structure, even though I ultimately solved the problem differently. Those were the conversations that taught me the most.

If a suggestion made me pause, I’d ask the agent to give me some examples and ask follow-up questions. What would be an alternative to what I’m doing now? Why is this suggestion useful? What will it improve? Then a conversation would ensue. Not between adversaries, but between two parties working toward a common outcome. I was well aware that the AI agent was not a committed partner, but the thread of discussion often felt as though it was.

Principle 4: Make the learner think first, AI second.

In the creative process of writing a book, I am the learner, so it is up to me to do the work, both the heavy lifting and the light touches. Using the coach reminds me of something my father used to say: “The best thing about buying your first car is paying for it.” As someone who has never owned a car, I do not have direct experience with this, yet I do know the satisfaction of taking a piece of advice from the agent, rewriting part of a chapter or expanding on an idea, and recognising that the piece is now better.

The coach could make suggestions endlessly, but until I wrestled with those suggestions myself, nothing had really been learned. The learning happened in the rewriting, not in reading the feedback. Every decision remained mine. Sometimes I accepted a suggestion wholeheartedly. Sometimes I rejected it immediately. More often, one suggestion led me to an entirely different solution that neither the coach nor I had imagined at the outset.

All learning begins with baby steps. Sometimes I felt very wobbly on my legs, the way babies learning to walk resemble drunken sailors. I would take a group of suggestions and begin revising, only to abandon the whole approach halfway through. Since I was using Scrivener as my writing platform, wobbling back to the starting line was no problem.

I never tracked changes. Instead, I rewrote the text, paused for a day or two, and then read the chapter again. I asked myself whether it now flowed smoothly and whether the ideas followed one another more naturally. If not, I returned to the previous version and tried another approach. If it felt right, I moved on to the next chapter and let the revised one rest for a while before returning to it once again with fresh eyes.

That ownership turned out to be essential. The coach could accelerate my thinking, but it could never replace it.

Principle 5: Use AI to identify errors, not fix them.

I love this use of the AI agent most of all. The best feedback I receive is when I ask, “What improvements or changes should I make? What is missing?” Especially the latter question exposed obvious oversights or prodded tender blind spots. Since the information came from a machine, nothing it said felt personal. I only had to ask myself whether what it said made sense or not. Nothing more.

There were two aspects of identifying errors where my AI coach fell short. One was that it had no concept of “good enough.” If I asked it whether the current version of a chapter was good enough as a first draft, whether it had reached a comparable level to the other chapters, the answer was always yes-and-no. There were always things that still needed fixing.

The other shortcoming was that no text was considered beyond saving. No matter how weak or incomprehensible a piece was, it apparently merited practical suggestions for how to improve it. Of course, the coach never said it was a mess.

It happened twice that I worked and worked on a chapter, allowing the AI agent to lead me down the garden path, only to realise that all my efforts were useless. I had to throw the chapters away and start again. Somehow, I wasn’t willing to give up as long as the agent kept making suggestions. This was a valuable lesson to learn. Like the Monty Python sketch about the Black Plague, my text was piled onto the wagon headed for a mass burial, and the agent was singing, “Not dead yet!”

Principle 6: Assess without the scaffolding.

This is where I am now, waiting for my editor’s verdict. If the feedback is largely positive, I will send the manuscript to the second editor. I fully expect many changes, but I also hope they will confirm that the heart of the book is there.

If that happens, I will decide whether to continue using the model in the next round or whether it has already served its purpose.

If the feedback reveals more fundamental problems, I will have to examine not only the manuscript but also the way I used AI throughout the process. That may bruise my ego, but learning something new often does.

In the end, Hartman’s article may prove to be right. The real question was never whether AI could write my book. It couldn’t. The question was whether it could help me become a better writer. That is something only another human being, my editor, can now help me answer.