Category: Communications

If attending a writing conference doesn’t inspire a blog post, nothing will.

I spent the last several days in Mexico at the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference and Literary Festival in a charming town about four hours drive north of Mexico City. I was proud to hold the flag for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, where I serve on the board.

The conference inspired me to try to write more often and more carefully. It also reminded me that writing is about conveying ideas and standing for something.

The town of San Miguel made the event unique. Every day, we would walk from our rented house on the hill overlooking the old town to the conference hotel, finding a different route through cobblestone streets just wide enough for one or two cars and hemmed in by tall walls of red, orange or blue clay. The walls hide shops, houses and gardens ranging from dirt and concrete to something that would be aspirational in Santa Fe's Canyon Road neighborhood.

At the conference hotel a few hundred mostly older folks met for seminars and hobnobbed about writing and publishing, but the real energy was outside.

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One lesson I learned in 2011 is that satisfation comes from advocating FOR the kind of future I want to see while still being realistic. Looking ahead at a new year, I refer to Wendell Berry's The Way of Ignorance for some wisdom. Here's a favorite passage:

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One thing that always strikes me during conversations with fellow Seattleites is how frustrated people are with government. They don’t feel listened to and they don’t believe that city government lives up the excellence of its citizens. And they don’t trust politicians.

I know we can do better. In the spirit of transparency, during my campaign I released my answers to questionnaires from various interest groups playing a role in the election. I asked my opponent and other candidates to release their questionnaires so that voters could see how they responded to business, labor and environmental groups that seek to influence the election with endorsements. Endorsements are valuable to voters only if the process is transparent.

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I'm a Seattle native and I ran for city council in 2011 in order to make my hometown a better place. To me that means creating more vibrant neighborhoods, implementing better transit and establishing economic policies that would make Seattle a more dynamic city. Those ideas influenced public debate during the campaign and helped earn about 40 percent of the vote on Election Day.

In the weeks since, my professional focus has shifted and I plan to spend more time thinking about communications, organizational strategy and policy issues from a more global perspective. I still love my hometown and this blog will give me an outlet when I have something to say. Expect some local politics mixed in with other observations as new opportunities unfold. Please let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!