Craigslist University: Accepted

 by J. Sanders-Nelson, 2016

Going through a freelance writer’s drought of paying gigs, I had this idea to list my writing services on Craigslist—hey we writers are always on our hustle, right? We are ridiculed for our college majors which are mainly English, Creative writing or any humanities degree and yet the same “funny” people who crack the same lame ass jokes about writers only teaching or working fast food continue year after year taking for granted that a writer is behind their current existence (from the instructions to putting together an IKEA shelf to the side effects of anti –depressants).

Now where was I, oh yes, so I went to the “services” link on Craigslist and it was like walking through the woods on a late night date with Jason Vorhees. 

Chilling.

The first 100 listings were for academic writing assistance. One listing even offered, for a fee, of course, to take online classes for students! According to Neoacademic.com, “These websites employ people to write papers for undergraduates for a fee. A student might pay $2 per page for a term paper, for example. But such papers can be used in either in-person or online courses. This is not in any way unique to online courses.”

Really?

I wondered, how many paralegals, veterinarian assistants, and day care workers have used their excessive student loan dollars to pay some else to do their coursework? Yikes!

How many red-cheeked medical interns are smiling their way to the bank because some writer tucked away in a musty old home office, pounded out research papers for them? In a  2013 abstract posted by Medscape.com, “The reported prevalence of cheating among US medical students ranges from 0% to 58%. Cheating behaviors include copying from others, using unauthorized notes, sharing information about observed structured clinical encounters, and dishonesty about performing physical examinations on patients.”

How many people have cheated and really don’t know their stuff but still sit pretty and get paid to perform on a good-paying job they are NOT qualified for either by education or experience? 

According to James Spencer, an IT manager, and consultant, the cost of  hiring unqualified workers can be at great cost: “…your customers will come in contact with these "less-qualified" individuals. If customers are not happy with the service they receive, you risk losing them—a costly mistake. Plus, the morale of the rest of your staff may deteriorate if they are burdened with additional workload because you’ve hired workers who can’t do their job. The cost of turnover is high, and you will be faced with this expense if veteran staff members decide to leave.”

What kind of world are we living in where people can pay for some else to receive the required education? What kind of learners, workers and producers are we leaving this world to?  An associate dean at the University of Florida, Chris Loschiavo addresses this issue in his article, “Why do students cheat? Listen to this dean’s words”, which suggests that 70% of college students admit to some type of cheating. Loschiavo goes on to state that students may behave this way for several reasons, the prime example being that they are “…motivated by the path to success that they see around them – people cheating without incurring any real consequences.” 

Most disheartening is that fact that society seems to reward some of these behaviors with more attention.

Will there ever be laws against cyber-cheating in an attempt to instill integrity back into our culture?

 Or will Craigslist simply join the growing number of for-profit education institutions? Congratulations, you have been accepted into Craigslist University, but then again, so is everyone else.

Bibliography

Online Plagiarism and Cybercheating Still Strong – 61.9% by Richard N. Landers 2011 http://neoacademic.com/2011/02/04/online-plagiarism-and-cybercheating-still-strong/

Cheating in Medical School by Anita V. Kusnoor, MD and Ruth Falik, MD Southern Medical Journal 2013 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/809141

TechRepublic Member: Hiring unqualified workers is no way to save money by James Spencer 2001 http://www.techrepublic.com/article/techrepublic-member-hiring-unqualified-workers-is-no-way-to-save-money/

Why do students cheat? Listen to this dean’s words by Chris Loschiavo 2015 http://theconversation.com/why-do-students-cheat-listen-to-this-deans-words-40295

SCHNICTION: Hybrid writing revealed

Writer J. Sanders-Nelson, sat out to publish a novella of small confessions. She thought she had a grip on life enough to reveal tid-bits of her life. So, she bundled together writings from over a ten year span and publish them.

However, J. struggled with the title, she struggled with coming up with what exactly it was she was publishing. This went on for about a week and finally, she settled on SCHNICTION. Her choice of the title, in her mind encompassed every aspect of her work, fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and prose. It was a hodge-podge of musings, ranting, ravings, journaling, poetic and fictional longing of unrequited love…so abstract, so cohesive that she had to come up with her own name for the compilation. Then, she stumbled upon a post from Brevity magazine’s Facebook page about “hybrid” writing. The door opened and clarity rushed in; her writing was of a hybrid nature, in that it contained influence from all formats, forms and even genres of writing. 

Hybrid writing is a relatively new term and articles regarding this kind of writing are limited. However, Jessica Dewberry’s article, “In the Trenches with Hybrid at AWP 2014” was very enlightening and offered some solace regarding hybrid writing. In the end, however, Dewberry simply calls herself a writer and not a hybrid writer. Because the terms was just too broad, too complex to try and fully explain:

“When people used to ask, “What do you write?” I found myself always wanting to include hybrid in my response. I would start the hot breath sound of the letter “h” before inhaling it back and then just describe a piece I was working on, hoping they got the picture. When I got back from the AWP, I deleted hybrid from my online profiles, leaving writer to speak for itself.” Dewberry

It was at this point that J. Sanders-Nelson, decided that perhaps adding “hybrid” to brand her writing might give a better impression of her style or at least get someone to crack open a page out of shear curiosity. She however, still simply refers to herself as, a writer.

Blocked Much?

by Paula J. Sanders

Writer’s block is a female dog, in heat with a bad mood, no doubt about it. To further the issues a writer may have with creating is that one stresses over the inability to “put it on the page” as my friend C. Stephen Foster always says. But it’s not that easy? Or is it…

After multiple deaths in my family, writer’s block sat in and lingered, pointing and laughing at me, manifesting itself into the ‘lack of confidence monster” under my bed. I pouted and whined to friends but never really sought remedy. My friend Richard Ali, figured it could have been the case of over working myself, with two jobs during the summer, stating “…its quite a drag on creativity.” He was right of course, so I dropped one job and stuck with the one I felt was more creatively conducive.

I reached out to a few of my family of writers to get ideas on how they deal with or have dealt with writer’s block. My first response was from Montre Bible, author, artist, actor and self-proclaimed, local internet socialite, who provided a simple suggestion, “…you just stop and live a little... or just write a little...a sentence...don’t force it... but you need to relax or read a book…”

Normally, I would turn to my favorite author and muse, James Baldwin, and read the beginning of “Just Above my Head”. There is something about the grief of Hall Montana that blasts me back into the reality of how good I really do have it; most of the time. Only in the moment, in the midst of my own grief, I couldn’t bring myself to read about the loss of a little brother, having suffered the loss of my god-brother “Moses”. So I shied away from what usually works for me out of sadness and fear of memories. 

However, according to Richard Ali, my most distant friend, a writer from Jos Plateau, Nigeria, author of “City of Memories”, believes a book could be just the seed you need. “The trick is to write whatever comes, usually stuff unrelated to the project at hand or to alternately pick up a book and read. Ideas have a way of doing strange fertilizing things to each other such that soon enough you're writing again on course.” Ah, Richard, the Eloquent, his words already taking root; growing. What might we find, bound and hidden away in the pages of our favorite text or a strange new novel, giving off ghostly musings at our reading leisure?

Do writers have leisure time? As a writer, have you ever told someone that writing is what you do for a living? Have they responded with, “Oh so you just sit around and write.” Um, yes because it’s just that damn easy: the starving, reclusive and lonely author, pondering life over the soothing whirl of his vintage electric typewriter.

It’s much more serious than that. “I write morning pages and I write and I remember each day. And if that fails I set a date to write with a friend--- no talking just lay track.” An avid believer in “The Artists Way” by Julia Cameron,  actor, writer and author of “Awakening the Actor Within”, teacher and a second personality of Miss Celie (from The Color Purple), C. Stephen Foster, proffered his ritual, which has proven to be the golden egg for him.

But a thousand year old egg for me... I started my morning pages, for one morning and stopped when I didn’t wake up writing the latest greatest story in the world. The most frustrating thing about battling writer’s block is how many ideas without inspiration I had swarming around my head like drunken bees. Similar to the creative fate of my friend, co-founder of Blaque Artists Collective and creative partner in dramatic crime, Buster Spiller. This is what he shared:

“I wait for inspiration to write. If I really want to 'spark' that inspiration, I watch a movie or TV program related to the theme and that sometimes helps. For me, writing is a 'feeling'. Like yesterday, I was thinking about writing something that would be the equivalent of "A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry in terms of the need for a GOOD family drama with issues of today…That thought stayed with me and this morning when I got up, I had the concept. Then I had the title. [My partner] and I walked the babies (Sadie, elder black lab and Beau, baby lab and newest member of the family) around the lake, the characters started to come to me but vaguely. I got home to write and BOOM, writer's block. LOL! By chance (and probably not), my female cousin called to talk about some family issues. As we talked, the character descriptions came to me like rapid fire! She had to hang up momentarily and during that brief period, I cranked out the descriptions of the 8 characters.”

So is it providence for Buster or maybe for everyone. I learned from Stephen that what you put out into the Universe is what you get back. So as writers perhaps we are always putting out or pleading to the Universe for inspiration and suddenly it comes in the form of a phone call, text chain message or finding an old picture of something that sparks a memory and then…your fingers tingle.

Is there a missing method? A secret to getting around this giant block of Gibraltar halting the flow of creativity? Donnie Wilson, writer, director, producer and dear friend has it almost down to a science. “Whenever I encounter writer's block, I will do a combination of one or three things":

1. Completely remove myself from the piece to involve myself in someone else's Creative endeavor. This usually reinvigorates my writing immediately.

2. I will highlight key questions regarding the direction of the work and mull over them ad nauseum until my sub conscious is engaged. When I go to sleep my creative juices start to flow, sometimes waking me in the middle of the night with inspiration. However, this method is not time dependable and can't be relied upon if I have a deadline. But I must say it has created some of my best writing.

3. I push through it. Not giving myself a break. And if it a small blockage, I am able to move creatively forward.”

illustration by JADII

Pushing through it, in the end, isn’t that what any good writer will do, deadline or not. Don’t we have to get it out and on the page? Isn’t there within us some eternal itch, the gifting we have pressing against us like tiny fetus feet, waiting to be born? And what do we do? We push.

Of course during the worrying about my bout of never ending writer’s block, inspiration dropped down on me like a ton of bricks and the veil was lifted. Now, I am writing, revising and writing some more. I guess my personal solution: stop stressing about it, stop obsessing about it and the words will come. Which-ever advice you take or ignore, the ultimate goal is to tell the story, get it out, at all creative cost, dammit tell that story and bask in your own personal glory.

Mantra: “Writing is everything to me.” Repeat.

Universe=Heart

"My heart is in sync with the Universe and my Universe is in sync with my heart. Therefore, I must be careful of how I love and even how I hate. The Universe will give me exactly what it is that I give out." ---J.Sanders, writer, teacher, mother

"What you give out is exactly what comes back to you, in it's own due time...that's what I would say because it is real..."--- Buster Spiller, actor, writer, director

"The universe has a way of returning favor whether you are in sync or not, so we should always be happily carefree with love and careful not to hate at all." ---TY, reasonalist

"The universe responds to your VIBRATION and to what you concentrate upon...so, if you are...focusing on being poor or unloved, or anything "negative" you are attracting MORE into your life....but IF you focus on positive and things that you WANT you are drawing that into your life...give up all negative, helpless, "victim" stories and talk only about what you want and it will swing into your life...start telling the miracle stories, the stories of awards you're winning, you books selling, and see for yourself how fast those things begin to show up....also, watch how quickly you tell a negative story and how FAST your life can start to swing THAT way. experiment and play with this law...." --- C. Stephen Foster, author, actor, writer, director, filmmaker

“I would respond that I absolutely believe in this. I'd even argue that I live my life by such a principle. I'm dealing with an issue with my car right now and I've been tempted to say the most evil, racist things to this man (he's Mexican) and make all kinds of threats. The problem is, internally, I feel like this man is OK deep down. He's just trying to make his money and feed his family. I'm still pissed, but I'm refraining from spitting venom at him because I feel like putting out that level of hatred towards someone will most definitely come back on me. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. Or sometimes immediately; either way it's coming back. I think people should always allow themselves to be mad - because bottling up all that negative energy is what'll have someone picking people off from a clock tower. However, being deliberately being mean to someone is uncalled for. If I refrain from cussing him out now, someone will refrain from cussing me out later. You ever cut somebody off - accidentally or on purpose, doesn't matter - and then almost immediately get cut off by someone else? That's the Universe correcting itself. Some things are small and require little to no inconvenience on your part. You'll be irritated, but it'll pass quickly because your initial infraction was mildly irritating to the Universe. Some things are big; so you get hit with your car getting stolen or losing $100 bucks in a parking lot or you might even accidentally harming yourself. The Universe always corrects itself. That's why you have to continuously count your blessings. Because somewhere along the way, you did something right and the Universe is pleased. It's why when you get blessed, you should look for chances to bless someone else. Because it gives them a chance to bless someone and so on. Think of the effects of that cycle of positivity. It's enough to make me believe in and live by the statement you've made above.”--- Catherine “Ms. Gata” Montgomery, writer, thespian

Ok the root of hate is fear. Fear is the absence of love and is our teacher to help us truly understand what love is. This is usually my quote "Suffering or fear is the illusion that affords us the opportunity to understand the reality of love." ---Ty Hudnall, alternative healer, musician, astrologist