Last week, a fellow BlogHer editor sent me a note about a new site that was starting up called The Listserve.  I wrote about it and my reservations on BlogHer, and one of the creators got in touch to answer those questions as well as many others I posed below.  I’ll admit that I have spent more time considering what might enter my inbox than what I would say if I was chosen.  I thought about it so much that I didn’t sign up.

The gist of the site is that it’s a listserve that sends out a daily email.  The email’s subject matter is chosen and provided by one member of the group.  It’s a lottery with a winner every day, and at the heart is the question: what would you say if you had one million people listening?

It’s a heady thought.  A slightly terrifying, overwhelming thought.

The project came out of a graduate class at NYU in the interactive telecommunications program (cue music from Rent — pretty much any song that contains Tom Collins and Angel Dumott Schunard) and Greg Dorsainville explains,

[We looked] to see what decisions people like you have made in order to foster the types of conversations you want. It’s amazing how design can control these sorts of aspects.  So the listserve is our attempt to foster interesting, diverse conversation, by giving  an amplified voice to people that may not have that normally between people who normally do not interact. With that goal, we want to make sure the conversation does not stray toward hate speech and other offensive language that mars too much of the Internet conversation space.

It’s an admirable goal; an interesting concept.  Don’t like the comment section of the New York Times (and… I don’t), then change the conversation.  Create an equally diverse community but don’t allow the conversation to devolve into name-calling and snarkiness.

Dorsainville reassured me that emails go through their team before being released to the entire listserve.

We reserve the right to reject emails that violate the spirit of the list. And that spirit is sensitive to being inclusive, diverse, and fair. I cannot say exactly until we see it, but I feel that our group and project want to respect the email space that people have given us.

Equally, when I expressed my fear that the listserve could be used to send out what amounts to a suicide note or a suicide threat and asked if the person would receive counsel, Dorsainville stepped up to the plate much in the way we’ve seen Frank Warren provide outreach via his project, Postsecret.

This listserve is not the wild west. We would never share a message to the list that comes close to a suicide note, and we would do our best to get that person the help they may need. We will do our best. I hope that helps.

Hate speech is expressly forbidden as stated in the “you won” letter, though when I asked who is defining hate speech and how would they  respond to accusations of censorship, Dorsainville admitted that they hadn’t yet figured this out.  Nor do they have a plan in place if the listserve morphs into what amounts to a daily advertisement.

If [the daily email] gets to be something that none of us want to open, we will reevaluate and probably attempt to reboot. But we want to know what comes, first.

There will be no way at this point for people to respond to the emails nor forums for discussion.  It is solely a one-way conversation from the speaker to our inboxes.  Nor have they considered whether or not they will track how many people actually open their daily email, therefore providing no information to the people providing the content: are they really speaking to one million people, or are the majority of those people hitting delete?  And lastly, there is no way to opt-out and ask not to be chosen in the daily lottery.

It is something we have discussed in the group, but so far we have decided for this to succeed, we cannot provide the mechanism to read only. It is important for the users to realize that at any point they may be thrust into the spotlight to address the group. I know that might sound difficult for most (since so many people tend not to want to talk out in public), but we do believe this is a great opportunity.

I ended up signing up for The Listserve.  The first email will be going out within the next 48 hours.  Who knows what I’ll find in my inbox; if it will be the most brilliant thought I would have never encountered in the circles I move in traditionally on the Web or if it will be words that will ruin my day.  It’s a big experiment, and we’re all the guinea pigs — the people who sign up as well as the bystanders who end up catching snippets of the discussion.

What specifically would you tell people if you were chosen?  And if I’m chosen, can I count on all of you to help me construct what to say?

Speaking of the Internet, apparently there is a worldwide outage of Gmail at the moment.  Even knowing that no one else has email either, therefore people will be generally understanding for why you haven’t responded to a particular message, this thought fills me with dread, even more so than the Blackberry outage this past fall where I couldn’t access email while away from the computer.  There is something unnerving about having the option to communicate taken away vs. my own choice.  There is something very different about not turning on email vs. email not functioning.

There should be a name for this type of anxiety.

It made me think about which emails I would miss the most if I couldn’t access them.  My first emails with Josh before and after our first date?  The one from Steve Jobs?  Random ones that I’ve starred and kept to reread whenever I’m feeling down?

Which emails would you miss the most?

Liljan at Choose To Be Me and I were talking recently about the first time we heard about email.  I was standing on the camp’s driveway saying goodbye to another counselor who was heading back to college.  I was in high school, about to enter my senior year.  He was telling me about email, suggesting that I get an account if I can — he wasn’t sure it was available off of college campuses.  I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept of email.  I literally pictured it like pneumatic tubes between houses, and the letter you typed on the computer somehow got printed out and dropped in a tube and it showed up at the other person’s house.  He kept repeating that there was no paper involved, but I couldn’t see how that was possible.  Even fax machines — which I knew about but had never used at that point — still utilized paper.

I thought this guy was crazy and filed the information away under things to figure out when I had to deal with it and not beforehand.

That year, my dad signed up for Prodigy, and I got my very own email address.  I could only email other Prodigy users — not people using a different system.  Which meant that I could email other family members as well as a boy I met online named Doug.  We gave each other relationship advice.  It was a pretty chaste online relationship: he, asking what his girlfriend meant when she said certain things because girls are so confusing! (“Melissa, do you think she really wants to go with me to the dance, or do you think she’s only saying that because she thinks that’s what I want to hear?  Girls are so confusing!”) and I asked him what he thought about my boyfriend (boys weren’t quite as confusing, but mine happened to tell me about his astral projection incidents, and that required a lot of verbal dissection with Doug).  We kept in touch through my first year of college and then Doug disappeared into the Internet ether, caught in some invisible pneumatic tube.

*******

In college, we had usenet rooms.  First of all, only a certain amount of people could be in the room at a given time.  So you logged in (by using your dial-up modem and tying up the phone line) and saw where you were in the queue.  During busy times, it could take hours to get on.  And then there was the frustration of losing the connection, which bumped you out of the system, and then you had to get in the queue again.  I went online a lot in the middle of the night.

Which meant that it was mostly Australians awake with me.  I spoke to a lot of people at Monash University and University of Ballarat.  I had one boy — whose name I’ve now forgotten — that I met online most nights to talk.  He was at Ballarat.  Almost everyone online back then was in college.

It took so long to get online and so long to send a message and get an answer, that you had to do something else in the meantime.  I remember that I read Vox in one evening while waiting to get into the usenet room.  There were a bunch of copies floating around campus.  When someone finished it, they left it in a public area and another person could take it.  I got my copy while sitting on Library Mall — someone walked by and passed along their copy after asking if I had read it.  I remember sitting there at night, moving the mouse from time to time so the screen saver would disappear and show me how many more people were ahead of me in the computer queue, and then reading the whole book in one sitting so I could pass it along to someone the next day.

I always wondered what happened to all those floating copies.  Later that year, I purchased my own copy at Canterbury books when they got in the pink cover.

Wait, we were talking about the Internet, not phone sex books.

The best part of usenet was that you could pop on, find someone from Norway (let’s say), and quickly ask your Scandinavian history question right before your Scandinavian history exam.  Usenet showed which university the person was writing from.  It was my first foray into obtaining quick information online.

*******

The first time I saw the World Wide Web, I was at work, at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  My friend called me into another co-worker’s office.  She was trying to log into the Web via a modem, and she showed us a website where you could read a book online.  By my junior year, I had Eudora and a university email address.  So even though I had finally wrapped my brain around email and wrote regularly with people far away (though a busy day was five messages, and I still needed to log on with a dial-up modem that tied up the phone line, so I only checked once at night, and that was at a very late hour when people probably wouldn’t be calling.  No one wanted to go online during the day and tie up the phone line), I couldn’t understand how the Internet would ever catch on.

In addition, the address bar was just a series of numbers — we still had IP addresses for websites vs. URLs — and there was no way to look up a page; no search engine.  You only knew of a website because someone had sent you the numbers, and you typed them in.  I couldn’t see how this was going to be useful.  What were we going to do?  Just sit around on our dial-up email sending each other random strings of numbers all day?  I would not be passing along these information chain letters, thank you very much!

Even though it was pretty damn cool.  I mean, 30 minutes to upload a single page wasn’t that long.

*******

My senior year of college, I got a webpage.  Someone in the IT department set it up for me.  It was a survey that people could fill out, and when they hit send, the results were emailed to me.  Every night, I could log into my email (during off-hours!) and collect the results and tally things up on paper.  It was a survey for a sexual anthropology paper I was writing about the transmission of viruses.

I ran around from classroom to classroom writing the same message on the chalkboard:

PLEASE DO NOT ERASE!

Please fill out my survey for my sexual anthropology paper.  It is a website.  The address is 49.238.78.12

This was not the exact note nor address, but it’s close enough.

Then I had to go back to rooms to make sure the message was not erased.  And sometimes I needed to argue with professors that there was no other way to get out word about the survey if I didn’t do this.  And my G-d, I had to touch chalk and I hated touching chalk. (I hate chalk so much that when I became a teacher, they replaced the chalkboard in my room with a whiteboard because I couldn’t stand the idea of touching chalk every day.)

And most professors told me to do my research the traditional way and not use a newfangled website!  And I said things like, “you just don’t understand, old man.”

Actually, I mostly nodded when they told me that because I agreed with them: this seemed like a very time-consuming and difficult way to collect information.

And yet, I did it anyway.  Because it was just so. damn. cool.

*******

What were your first experiences with email and the Web?

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop.

Whether you are joining from the very beginning or finding this first post in the series at a later date, this is the place to get to know your virtual classmates, find writing partners, and introduce yourself to the rest of the group.  From time to time, I will be reminding people to dive back into the comment section below and find people to connect with over writing.  So introduce yourself even if you’re late to the game.

But first some logistics.

MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings.  You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.”  You don’t need to read them on Sundays — in fact, you probably want to save them until you can concentrate on them.  I’ll usually give you homework at the end.  On the other hand, there will also sometimes be time-sensitive lessons such as a query letter critique, where once the critique is closed, we won’t be giving you an edit on your query letter until the next one.  So… follow along as closely as you need to follow along.  If that makes sense.

MFA programs are usually organized into two umbrella categories — fiction and poetry.  Some programs also hold classes on creative non-fiction and playwriting/screenwriting.  MFA Sunday School will cover the basics of poetry — free form and fixed form.  The basics of short story writing.  How to dissect fiction and then use what you learn to enhance your own work.  How to develop a novel.  How to write creative non-fiction.  Formatting for playwriting/screenwriting.  How to look at your own work with a critical eye.  How to submit to literary magazines.  How to pitch to editors.  How to form a relationship with a writing partner and look at each other’s work with a critical eye.  Critique of query letters.  And any other topics you’d like to know about that are usually covered in an MFA program.  In other words, anything and everything related to writing.

A few years ago, I wrote an eleven-part series on getting a book published. (You need to unfortunately read it from the bottom up since the top post is the eleventh or final post.)  We’ll be delving back into that too, especially because the publishing world keeps changing and as new options open, such as e-books or Amazon singles, we need to keep looking at the process of getting your work out there.  If you liked that series, MFA Sunday School is going to be similar except it will cover a wider range of topics.

I am your main teacher.  I have an aforementioned MFA.  I also studied creative writing as my undergraduate degree, so I have seven straight years of workshops.  I’ve published two books so far — one fiction, one non-fiction.  I have a handful of published poems.  I’ve been the editor in chief of two literary magazines.  I’m a section editor at BlogHer for Blogging & Social Media.  I’ve written the blog Stirrup Queens for almost six years.  I’m going to need to pull in other writers from time to time as well as agents, publishers, literary magazine editors so I won’t be the only person you’ll see here.  Hopefully we’ll have some fun guest speakers.

Why an online weekly writing program?  Why not.  I have the information in my brain; I know it’s expensive to go to university full time — it seems like a win-win.  The focus of an MFA program is not to get you published per se but to get you to be a better writer, a goal that many bloggers share with book writers and poets.  So I see this as a way of mutually supporting each other to become better writers whether your medium is fiction writing, poetry writing, playwriting/screenwriting or blogging.  I like connecting with people who like to write, who want to write better, who want to understanding the process of writing, who like words and want to play with them.

So, last few things before we start getting to know one another.  The comment section will be your space to speak to your classmates (always in a civil tone).  There will be exercises sometimes at the bottom of the post, and I would appreciate it, if you have a blog or online space, if you could post your work on YOUR blog and then post a link to the work in my comment section.  Then people can jump from here to visit your space.  If not, the comment section will become extremely crowded (sestinas are long!).  If you don’t have a blog, don’t worry; you can post your work here in the comment section.  I’m just trying to cut down on the number of people who do so.  The comment section for each lesson is open indefinitely.  If a particular exercise resonated with you, it’s a good idea to bookmark that post and return to it from time to time to see if there are new comments and new pieces of writing to read.

I definitely also recommend getting a writing partner.  You don’t have to do this immediately, but pay attention to other people in the comment section and see if there is someone who sounds like they could be a good fit.

I’m also going to start using the Prompt-ly list for general writing discussion, and it will compliment the MFA Sunday School posts.  It will be a place to ask questions, find writing partners, discuss the topic of the week, etc.  If you’re already on the Prompt-ly list and this appeals to you, no need to do anything.  If you’re not on the Prompt-ly list and want to be able to take the discussion off-blog and to email, sign up via that link.  If you’re on the Prompt-ly list and don’t want to talk about writing… well… then I’m not sure why you’re on the Prompt-ly list since I wrote in the opening post that there will be how-to information in the future.  It will still be a place to throw out blog ideas, interesting articles, and the like.  But this will take it one step further where it will be about all mediums of writing.  I’m not sure how often we’ll need to go to email for discussion, but throwing it out there as a resource that is already in place — an email group of writers.

And… that’s about it.

It’s now time for you to introduce who you are and why you’re here.  First and foremost, tell us about what you write: your blog, any publications, whether you’re more interested in poetry or fiction.  Tell us what you hope to learn as well as what you like to read.  What are your long-range goals?

And then please vote below to let me know which of the following topics appeal to you most (all will be covered, but I’m trying to get a sense of what people want to learn in depth vs. what people want to touch on briefly).  There is an “other” option for you to fill out other things you’d like to learn.  Or feel free to add that in your introduction below if you have a few items.

So welcome to class and let’s get ready to learn.

Okay, last thoughts on food.  I am seriously fascinated by the various ways we think about the things we put in our mouths.

That just sounded dirty.

Lori raised a good point: what is the definitely of a foodie?  Is it only the food consumer, or is it also the food preparer?  Can you be a foodie if you like to prepare food, but you don’t like to eat it?  Obviously, you could be a foodie if you consumed food but never prepared it.  But could you call a chef who doesn’t take great pleasure in consuming food a “foodie?”

I guess I’ve always seen the word as solely a term for the consumer of food and not the preparer.  My view point is obviously skewed because I make a lot of food I don’t consume.  First and foremost, I cook meat and I’ve never tasted it.  I judge its doneness based on temperature and look.  So far, unless everyone is lying to me and just enduring my cooking, it’s working well.  I guess how things taste based on smell, and I create new recipes for meat accordingly by pairing together ingredients that just smell “right” with one another.  Or I follow another person’s recipe.  Ina Garten hasn’t steered me wrong.

I also love baking and candy-making; both activities bring me great pleasure.  But I often don’t eat what I make.  I gave up sugar a few months ago so I didn’t, for instance, consume anything that I made for Purim.  They seemed to bring other people great oral pleasure (unless, of course, they’re lying to me), but I had no desire to taste any of it.  I see the act of preparation as very separate from the act of consumption, though I know this isn’t the case for other people.  I enjoy cooking, I enjoy baking, I enjoy making up new recipes and I enjoy giving food to other people; but I don’t always enjoy consuming the products that I just enjoyed preparing.  I make them because their preparation makes me happy and giving them away seems to make other people happy.  And I totally get that it brings someone else happiness, but consuming these things would not make me happy.

I would never describe myself as a foodie, because I see a foodie as a willing, open-minded receiver.  And while I’m a willing, open-minded giver, I am absolutely not a willing, open-minded receiver of even my own preparations.

What do you think?  Is foodie only the consumer or does it also apply to the preparer when the two are mutually exclusive?

*******

A few years ago, I wrote an eleven-part series on getting a book published. (You need to unfortunately read it from the bottom up since the top post is the eleventh or final post.)  A bunch of people told me that it was helpful, and I’m obviously still open to answering any questions as you try to get a book published.  But book publishing is a pretty small part of getting an MFA.  The much larger focus is on becoming a better writer, and part of that is trying your hand at various exercises.  I think there is a lot of common, usable good that can come from an MFA program especially in regards to blog writing and building a blog, but it’s a pretty inaccessible degree.  Unless you get a fellowship, it’s an expensive degree in the sense that it isn’t easy to make back the money spent.  And not many writers have the time to commit to finishing a writing degree.

So I’m offering it for free.  The contents of my brain and seven straight years of workshop.  Oh, and the experience I’ve had as an editor of two literary magazines, writing professor, two books, and a handful of published poems.  I’m not the only one for the job — there are far better writers on the Internet and I’ll be yanking them in here from time to time — but I am the one who is offering up all this content and all my connections for free.  And hey, free is good.

I’m calling it MFA Sunday School because I’ll post on most Sunday mornings.  If you don’t want to follow along, skip that first post on Sundays (since I have a tendency to also write my own thoughts about life on Sundays as a warm up for other writing).   If you do want to follow along from home, you can either read the post on Sundays or read the post at your leisure.  Collect them up in your Google Reader and do the exercises in your spare time.  The comment section of the posts will be for people to post a link to their own work (due to length, I’m going to ask people to post on their own blogs and then just leave a link that people can follow back to your space.  Unless you don’t have a space on the Web, and then feel free to post the whole piece of writing) and they will be open indefinitely.

MFA Sunday School will cover the basics of poetry — free form and fixed form.  The basics of short story writing.  How to dissect fiction and then use what you learn to enhance your own work.  How to develop a novel.  How to write creative non-fiction.  How to look at your own work with a critical eye.  How to submit to literary magazines.  How to pitch to editors.  How to form a relationship with a writing partner and look at each other’s work with a critical eye.  Critique of query letters.  And any other topics you’d like to know about that are usually covered in an MFA program.

This Sunday, I can post a formal opening to the project and take votes on topics.  That post would be the one where I’d ask everyone who plans to participate to introduce themselves so people could find writing partners via the comment section.

BUT I would like to know now if this sounds interesting to you, if you think you’d want to drop in and out depending on whether or not the topic of the week resonates with you (see, another good part about a free online MFA course — you don’t have any required credits to complete).  If this idea doesn’t resonate with you, there is no need to write these posts.  I already have the information in my brain.  But I like connecting with people who like to write, who want to write better, who want to understanding the process of writing, who like words and want to play with them.  So if you’re game, let me know and we can get started this Sunday.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Pain Olympics” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Being Counted” (Stirrup Queens) – thank you, Lori!
• “The Little Fertility Clinic that Could and Almost Didn’t” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Biting the Hand that Feeds Me” (Project Progeny)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hobbit-ish Thoughts and Ramblings has a fun post that made me think about how feelings towards characters change over time (and while all of you are not characters, I think the same can apply for bloggers themselves).  She admits that while she didn’t like Ginny Weasley that much at first, the character grew on her over the course of the Harry Potter series and later became her favourite.  I tried to think of places where this has happened.  Can you think of any?  Go over and let her know — it’s fun to consider.

The latest post in the Faces of ALI series on Too Many Fish to Fry is a moving portrayal of one of my favourite bloggers.  It is exactly the type of story we wish the media would cover.  I love how Loribeth isn’t presented as solely an infertile woman — she is so much more than her uterus.  She is a historian, a memory keeper, a family member.  I cried when Loribeth called her mother after Katie’s death as well as the realizations she had holding her daughter.  It’s a gorgeous post — well-written and important to read if you want to understand how infertility affects a life.

My Life in a Nut Shell has a post about not feeling like herself.  She is currently pregnant again and holding her breath after prior losses.  She writes, “I just wish that I could find myself again and have this pregnancy be something I’m experiencing rather than it being who I am.”  It’s a moving post about losing who you are and hoping you can find yourself again.

Nuts in May has a great post about different ways of handling emotions, utilizing the term sidler to great success.  It is a look into the marriage of a compartmentalizer and a dealer (one who likes to deal directly with the issue), and what happens when the two attempt to communicate.  She sums it up perfectly here: “It’s all very well saying I can vent on the internet and get all those lovely supportive comments to make me feel better. You, Gentle Readers, do make me feel better. But you’re not very cuddly, and your neck doesn’t smell faintly of sandalwood and citrus, and you don’t make me tea.  And anyway, I like the feeling that the inside of my head is of some interest to my spouse. It’s not a feeling I’ve had for a good while. And I like the feeling that care and consideration of the spouse’s state of mind is reciprocal, not a one-way street.”  Go read the whole thing.

Lastly, Destined to be an Old Woman with No Regrets has lessons learned from an argument with her toddler, with ideas that apply to so many interactions in life.  I’m going to make you go over to read the whole situation, but I love the point she makes at the end: “At first my reaction was, ‘Ha! I won’. But that really wasn’t it at all. In the end, we both won, simply because we listened to each other. She got to make a choice and I got to set the parameters that would ensure not only that she was safe, but that I made it home in one piece physically and emotionally.”  Great lesson.

The roundup to the Roundup: What is the definition of a foodie?  Want to participate in MFA Sunday School?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 6th and April 13th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.