Pennywise choices for school fundraisers

My article on pennywise choices for school fundraisers was linked to by a frugal-minded blog.

Boogie-Woogie Google Boy

I have a fun piece on Clay Cotton live at Action Online:

Clay Cotton made his living at the piano from the 1960s to the 1990s. After contracting MS, he switched to mastering a whole other keyboard.

by Rebecca Kellogg

Clay Cotton was an in-demand piano man. At the height of his musical career, he played as a talented side man for musicians including Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and B.B. King.

That all changed after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Eventually his hands could no longer play the notes that had earned him his livelihood and he was forced to find another line of work. He and his wife, both early adopters of the Internet, have supported themselves entirely as online marketers since 1996.

Read the rest at Action Online.

Rockin' Roller

I have the cover story on the May/June 2009 issue of Action magazine.

The story is now up online.

Here's the opening:

Toby Forrest fronts hard-rocking band Cityzen in his wheelchair.

By Rebecca Kellogg

It is a chilly March night on Santa Monica Pier. Even in darkness, anglers huddle by baited lines at pier’s end. Beyond them the famous Pacific Wheel spins steadily, brightening the night with a light show visible for miles up the Pacific Coast Highway. Near the mouth of the pier, at Rusty’s restaurant, a battle of the bands is underway.

The bar is full, and so are most of Rusty’s tables. Decked out with an ocean theme, Rusty’s sports surfboards on walls alongside surf movie posters. The tables are draped with plastic beach floral tablecloths with lit candles as centerpieces.

At 8:30 p.m. the second band of the evening’s competition is ready to start its set. Cityzen, a five-member band, has completed its sound check. In the middle of the stage, Toby Forrest, the lead singer and a wheelchair user, is the center of attention. Forrest is flanked on the left by a keyboardist and on the right by a drummer and two guitar players. The band is ready to put on a show.

***

Visit the United Spinal web site to read the rest:
http://tinyurl.com/rockinroller

Laundry Savings

A new piece up at www.stretcher.com:

Laundry Savings
by R. Kellogg

It begins:

Awhile back, we took a good hard look at how we were doing our laundry and asked ourselves what we could do to save space, money, and time on laundry. Here's what we came up with . . .

Go to The Dollar Stretcher to read the rest

Modes of Transportation

My piece "Modes of Transportation" will appear in an upcoming issue of Appleseeds, a social studies magazine. Appleseeds bought all rights but gave permission for me to run the article on my blog. Here it is.

Modes of Transportation

by Rebecca Kellogg

Bus, boat, passeo, or car. People must travel--wherever they are!

How do people travel through the cities of the world?

Boat--Venice is built on an archipelago of 118 islands. Instead of roads, the city has canals. People travel by motorized waterbus or by gondola, or they use bridges to cross canals by foot.

Rickshaw--In some areas of Bangladesh, rickshaws are the only vehicles that fit the narrow streets. Many countries are replacing runner-pulled rickshaws with bicycle-powered pedicabs.

Cable car--In San Fransisco, cable cars move safely up and down steep city hills. Cable cars are propelled forward by gripping a moving cable.

Maglev train--In Shanghai a Maglev train rides above the rails, lifted by magnetic force. This train rushes from downtown to Pudong airport at up to 311 miles per hour.

Subway systems--in major cities including New York, Moscow, Tokyo, and London, subway trains run below ground. Riding underground has advantages--no stopping for surface traffic. But the subway can be crowded with many riders.

Steam train--In India and some African countries, steam trains are still used to transport people.

Why do different places use different kinds of transport? A city may choose a type of transportation because it suits that area's climate and terrain, because of cost, or to protect nature.

Cost can affect transportation choices greatly.

"In wealthy countries people might ride a brand new high-speed electric train," said transit planners Steven Brye and Sarah Manning in an email interview. "In some parts of the world like in India and Africa, people still ride steam-locomotive drawn trains because they cannot yet afford new trains."

In other situations transportation choices protect nature.

San Francisco's "Spare the Air" campaign asks people to take public transportation to work or to school to reduce pollution. In St. Paul, Minnesota, a light rail train was built as part of a movement to encourage better air quality. Sydney, Australia, also has a light rail system--and it runs twenty-four hours a day.

SIDEBAR: WALKING IN CITIES

In many cities people travel by foot.

Apartments, schools, and stores are close together. To travel further people can use light rail, subways, buses, and taxis.

In Santa Clarita, California, a network of paved paths called "paseos" connect homes, stores, and schools. Residents can walk or bike on the paseos while enjoying California's mild climate.

Some cities are friendlier to foot traffic than others.

"Cities that were built before cars became popular and accessible, like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, usually have more public transit and are easier to walk around," said transit planners Steven Brye and Sarah Manning in an email interview.

In some parts of the world, after the car became popular many cities removed streetcars and other mass transit. Today, much work is being done to rebuild efficient public transportation.

How to write a press release

My piece "How to write a press release" is now available for viewing at Massage Magazine Online.

Learning to write a good press release is a useful skill for anyone in business for themselves to master. If you don't want to learn to write them yourself, hire a writer!

Interview with Gary Presley

I have a new article up this week at "Action" magazine, a national magazine for the disability community.

I am delighted to have had the chance to write this piece, which spotlights a favorite writer of mine--Gary Presley, an essayist and polio survivor who writes with grace, insight, and good humor.

The article is here.

"Action" magazine purchased all rights to the story, but gave me permission to run the text on my blog, so here it is in full:

Essayist Gary Presley has just published a memoir about (among other things) living with post-polio syndrome.

By Rebecca Kellogg

Gary Presley was 17 when he was diagnosed with polio after being inoculated with the Salk vaccine in 1959. Unaware of the future, he took the last steps of his life wearing his favorite cowboy boots.

In the ensuing years, Presley faced his own limitations and the limitations of the way the world works. He has dealt with post- polio syndrome, worked in the insurance industry, and married. Mining his experiences for meaning, Presley has crafted rich essays and the recently published memoir Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio (University of Iowa Press). He has concluded that “all of us are riding out this life together, and we’re an interesting mix of every human characteristic spread out of a great gray sliding scale upon which ‘disability’ is but one marking point.”

Strength Through Typing

As a young man Presley took college correspondence courses and typed papers on a typewriter. As he recounts in his memoir, once he finished each assignment he often typed additional pages to help strengthen his hands and coordinate his limited arm movement. He eventually got to the point where he could and did type for two or three hours at a time. Presley produced hundreds of pages of journal entries and, using only the first three fingers of each hand, reached speeds of 40 to 50 words per minute, a speed he still maintains today.

Presley first submitted his work for a broader audience in the mid90s when the Joplin (Missouri) Globe announced an essay contest on the theme of “the future” in celebration of its centennial. The winning essay was to be placed in a time capsule.

“I was intrigued—ego and all that—imagining that someone might know my name after a century burned away, a mark on the world, so to speak, and so I entered,” said Presley. “It happened that I’d read in Time or Newsweek or some popular magazine about an experiment done in particle physics regarding a certain type of quark, which in laypersons’ terms ‘knew’ what was going to happen to it before it happened. I wrote an essay called ‘Letter from the Future,’ a short piece which used that idea—how civilization might evolve—that the future would not only know the past but could predict the future beforehand.”

Presley’s essay won the adult division of the Globe’s contest. Since then his work has appeared in the Cup of Comfort series, salon.com, Notre Dame magazine, and other venues.

“Cooking for Dogs”

“I like humor, but I really like stuff that reflects a more introspective view of the world,” Presley said. “I wrote an essay called ‘Cooking for Dogs,’ about the link between what was a ‘wolf’ and what is now ‘dog,’ and we who make them companions. I also wrote one called ‘A Rifle of My Own,’ which is about developing a reverence of life and secondarily about developing an understanding of my father’s unspoken appreciation of the fragility of life—and generally, I suppose, about the understanding that some things must die so that other things can live, but that doesn’t make killing a good thing.”

Presley’s essays commonly use everyday objects to launch thoughtful musings about the broader world. The moments that spark his essays can be arresting in and of themselves. In “Ants for Breakfast” which appears on salon.com, Presley recalls a morning when ants invaded his cereal box and he deliberately ate a few with his shredded wheat. From that point he explores multiple views of acceptable and unacceptable food sources through a series of memories and observant asides.

Presley attributes the depth and nuances of his writing in part to the writing process itself.

“In an odd way, I don’t know how to think about things without writing, at least things in a particular sense, in depth, in a manner I can relate to other people,” Presley said. “I know I like green tea, and I love dogs, and I prefer garbanzo beans over other types of beans, but I cannot tell anyone exactly why until I begin to write and think about the idea in particular. I don’t think I have a stable world-view—perhaps I have an ever-evolving world view is a better way of identifying it.”

Joy-Seeking Makeup

Presley’s writing often explores themes of struggle, despair, and redemption, using symbolism, which Presley claims not to reach for intentionally.

“I didn’t set out to write symbolically,” Presley said. “Whatever symbols there are are a revelation, a quick word-sketch, of how I interpret the world, how I want to show it to the reader, how I reflect it in my soul.”

He writes of driving past Styrofoam cups that have become a symbol when they are stuck through the holes of a chain link fence to form the shape of a cross.

In various places he writes of others who would cast him in their own religious theater. He writes of asking if God wanted him in a wheelchair, and not finding a satisfactory answer.

The memoir Seven Wheelchairs is Presley’s first foray into book-length work. His background as a writer of essays is clear in the form of the chapters—many of which read as stand-alone stories. Indeed, a few of the chapters began life as essays that have appeared in other publications. Gathered together and given an over-arching narrative, they tell the story of one man’s life, sharing his sadness, his anger, and his joys.

Though Presley’s book and essays examine closely life with its potential for sadness, the overall tone of his work is generally positive.

“I suppose somewhere along the way, somewhere too deep, too late in my journey, I decided to seek joy,” Presley said. “Not in a hedonistic way, of course, although there is joy to be found in physical things such as a plate of homemade spaghetti, but also curiosity about the world. It might be a matter of will. Or it might be a simple matter of inheriting my mother’s joy-seeking genetic make-up.”

Rebecca Kellogg is a freelance writer and editor based out of
California. Read more of her work at rkellogg.blogspot.com.

P.S. Gary's own web site is here if you'd like to read a sampling of his work: http://www.garypresley.com/