Weirding Word

Writing To Congress: Tips for Getting Your Voice Heard

This article by Gaea L. Honeycutt was originally published in Average Girl Magazine

For many people, it’s hard to know the best way to contact a U.S. senator or representative and then feel confident that the message has gotten through. Is anyone listening? Do those e-mails from advocacy groups really count for anything? Are some types of contact more effective than others?

The answer to all of these questions is "yes". And, you may be relieved to know that the old fashioned rules of correspondence still apply in today’s high tech world -- take the time to tailor your letter to the recipient and be polite. Whether you use snail mail, send an e-mail message or make a phone call, these time-tested principles combined with relevant, persuasive arguments will bring attention to the issues that concern you most.

According to Jenny B. Levy, a former staffer on Capitol Hill and the manager of Grassroots Advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, "If you want a response, you have to take a little more time than just hitting ‘send’ or ‘reply’. You have to think about how to address your member of Congress."

For correspondence, be sure to include your contact information so that the official’s staff knows where to reach you. In the first sentence, state why you are sending the letter or e-mail message. For example, "Millions of Americans are suffering from laughing sickness, and I urge you to vote in support of HR-0000: Laughing Sickness Research Funding."

The paragraphs that follow should provide personalized examples of why the issue is important to you. In the case of laughing sickness, has it affected you or your family? What’s been the impact on your community? How will a vote in favor of the bill help the community? What will happen if the official takes no action at all? If you have them, share data, facts or figures. End the letter stating the purpose again and summarizing why this action is important.

These tips apply to phone calls as well. State the reason for your call and then say why that is important to you. And, keep a level head no matter how passionate you are about the topic. "One of the biggest mistakes constituents make is being really angry and shouting," says Levy.

However, she notes, "The most effective way to have your voice heard is to actually go to Capitol Hill or the district office. We encourage our members to send a fax requesting a meeting and follow-up with a phone call." If the matter is more personal, Levy recommends visiting the district office.

Another effective way to draw the attention is using the newspaper. "They pay attention to the news from back home and keep clips." Submit a letter to the editor of your local paper or contribute an opinion/editorial article.

And, what about those form letters that advocacy groups encourage members to send en mass? "They tally the numbers to present on The Hill," explains Levy. But, your letter won’t get read unless you personalize it. Again, take that well-written frame and edit it to convey your interest in the issue.

If nothing changes after the first letter or phone call, don’t give up. "Democracy only works if we all speak," says Levy. "And, it takes persistence."

Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol

Gaea Honeycutt
blog@weirdingword.com

Weirding Word®, a division of G.L. Honeycutt Consulting, LLC, is a virtual publication department that provides editing, freelance writing, and publication and web design services.

Copyright 2008 Gaea L. Honeycutt. All rights reserved.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly Readings

Beltway Poetry Quarterly will sponsor 2 readings just prior to the Split This Rock Festival (which is now accepting registrations.)

Sunday, March 9, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Split This Rock Poetry Festival Reading, sponsored by Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
Featured readers: Brian Gilmore, Melissa Tuckey, Heather Davis, and Steve Rogers. Followed by open mic. Iota Bar and Restaurant, 2832 Wilson Blvd., Clarendon neighborhood, Arlington, VA. (703) 522-8340. Series hosted by Miles David Moore - Free Admission. http://www.wordworksdc.com

Sunday, March 16, 4:00 pm
Sunday Kind of Love Reading Series: Split This Rock Festival Reading sponsored by Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
Featured readers: Winona Addison, Naomi Ayala, Teri Ellen Cross, Yael Flusberg, Tanya Snyder, Dan Vera, Rosemary Winslow, and Kathi Wolfe. Followed by open mic. Busboys and Poets, 14th & V Streets, NW, DC. (202) 387-POET. Free Admission, although contributions are gratefully accepted. Guest hosts: Kim Roberts and Regie Cabico.

Weirding Word (SM), a division of G.L. Honeycutt Consulting, LLC, a virtural publication department that provides editing, freelance writing, and publication and web design services.

Copyright 2007-2008 Gaea L. Honeycutt. All rights reserved.

Weirding Word (SM) On Writers: Sarah Browning (Part 2)

In this posting, we continue an interview with Sarah Browning, author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and peace advocate.

WW: How do you approach your work? How do you create?
SB: These days the organizing has been crowding out the creative work far too much. In addition to coordinating DC Poets Against the War, I'm planning a major poetry festival, Split This Rock, for March of next year; I host a monthly series at Busboys and Poets, Sunday Kind of Love; and I have a part-time job at The Arts Club of Washington, administering their new National Award for Arts Writing.

So, I have to force myself to take time, even when/though it feels like there is no time. And I've been going away some on writing retreats. I was lucky to go to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts last December, for example.

WW: When you do sit down to write, how does the process happen for you?
SB: I like to read. So, I am often responding to, or jumping off from, something I have read. But, I never know where I'm going when I start to write. I have carried Pat Schneider's process forward into my regular practice, and try to let my unconscious lead me, at least at first. Of course it doesn't always work. Sometimes nothing comes except whining and worrying.

WW: How much of it do you end up recycling and what actually makes it?
SB: That percentage changes, but I'd say at least 80% doesn't make it out of the notebook. And some stuff that does get typed up withers on the vine.

WW: I can't remember the person, but I used to often see a quote, "The personal is political." Would you agree with that?
SB: Yes, that's been a slogan of the feminist and gay rights movement. I agree with it absolutely -- all of our interactions are influenced by social and political factors: race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ability. That doesn't mean I believe I am only a white, middle-class, well-educated woman, but that's a huge part of who I am. I can't help that. I once wrote a little poem:

WHITE
This poem
is a white poem
because I am white.
It is not a white poem
because it is a poem.

WW: What is different about your writing now that you didn’t expect when you first started? Would it be this consciousness about where your writing comes from and the socioeconomic influences that impact the writing?
SB: Certainly that's part of it. And the willingness to be so personally vulnerable in the writing. As I said, that was very scary for me 15 years ago.

WW: How did becoming published transform your life?
SB: I remember the first time I had a poem published in a literary journal -- these tiny magazines that may have a very modest readership but are the lifeblood of poetry. It was an incredible affirmation. Someone besides my sweet, supportive parents telling me I'd made the right decision to put writing more at the center of my life. And publishing a book is an incredible thing: exciting, scary, intensely vulnerable.

WW: At Weirding Word (SM), we believe that “language creates reality.” How does language create reality in your life? In your writing?
SB: I think as writers we always have to struggle to maintain an authentic language, especially in a culture that is drowning in the language of commerce, the language of propaganda, the language of subtle coercion. These are dead, artificial languages. We have wrestle with language, keep it on its toes, keep it alive. That's what gives me the greatest shot of pleasure -- when I feel like I'm engaging the language, and if I'm lucky, and working hard, maybe, just maybe, doing something a little bit new.

WW: What's next for you?
SB: I'm trying to get the book out there as much as possible, planning a number of readings. Focusing an enormous amount of energy on organizing Split This Rock. I hope folks will check it out at www.SplitThisRock.org. And trying to write new poems, revise poems that always, always need more work. Sometime next year, I hope to have a new manuscript. But I don't want to rush it…

WW: Sounds like you keep busy.
SB: My poetry productivity is pretty light these days, with everything else going on. So I'm just trying to be patient with myself. And at the same time, take myself to my writing notebook on a regular basis. It's the appointment I need to keep.

WW: What's your advice to new/budding writers out there?
SB: Read, read, read -- all kinds of writing, all kinds of poetry. Write frequently -- remember that most of it won't make it into published form. Find a community of like-minded writers and support one another: read each other's work, offer suggestions, arrange readings for one another, call up to complain when you get YET ANOTHER REJECTION from a literary journal on a piece of paper smaller than your thumb.

Sarah Browning's next reading is Sunday, December 9 at 6:00 p.m.:

Iota Bar and Restaurant
2832 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA
703-522-8340 or 703-256-9275

Weirding Word (SM), a division of G.L. Honeycutt Consulting, LLC, helps you communicate your ideas and information more effectively through tailored editing, freelance writing, publication and web design services.

Copyright 2007-2008 Gaea L. Honeycutt All rights reserved.

Weirding Word (SM) On Writers: Sarah Browning (Part 1)

Sarah Browning is author of the recently released book of poetry, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She is also co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology, a founder of D.C. Poets Against the War, and coordinator of Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness. Sarah has received the People Before Profits Poetry Prize and an individual artist grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

WW: Tell me a little about yourself and how you got into poetry?
SB: I started writing in high school and college, but then took a long break when I was a community and political organizer. I had this ridiculous notion that poetry was a bourgeois indulgence -- especially for a middle-class white girl. Finally, I realized that I was going out of my mind not writing, and left a high-powered political job so as to put poetry back at the center of my life. I was almost 30 at that time.

WW: High powered political job? For a candidate or a nonprofit?
SB: I work now on integrating these sides of myself -- the creative and the political -- coordinating DC Poets Against the War. I was the Executive Director of an organization in Boston called Citizens for Participation in Political Action (CPPAX), a multi-issue, progressive, statewide citizen activist group.

WW: How did you come back to writing?
SB: My partner, now husband, Tom Hertz, wanted to pursue a doctorate in economics, so we moved to western Massachusetts so he could go to UMass Amherst. I was lucky enough to land in a creative writing workshop with a poet named Pat Schneider, who is especially brilliant at helping writers get past blocks and silence the "internal editors" we carry around in our heads.

I had some very stern editors, who especially told me not to risk sentimentality -- that brush with which women's writing is so often tarred. The result, I think, is that we don't risk emotion; we don't risk telling the truth. Which is just as fatal, if not more so, to poetry as sentimentality.

WW: How did you overcome your editors?
SB: Pat's workshop method provides a very safe environment, one in which writers are encouraged to take risks. Participants write on the spot, from some exercise provided by the workshop leader. Then writers who are moved to read what they've written and the group responds only with what they like or remember. There's time for critique later -- but this writing is brand new and we don't want to be worry about what someone across the room is going to think. This process works incredibly well. I've used it and seen all kinds of writers produce astonishing things in 20 minutes -- children, women living in housing projects, PhD "writers." You can read more about it in Pat's book, Writing Alone and With Others. It took me about a year and a half in Pat's workshop before I stopped writing tiny, cramped, self-conscious poems that we're afraid of exposing anything.

WW: Much of your poetry is very serious. It doesn't seem necessarily sentimental, although there's not a lack of sentimentality either. How do you communicate the emotional side of your creative self?
SB: Well, I hope that each of my poems will touch someone emotionally. Different poems will speak to different readers, of course. But it is when I am moved, that I am moved to write poetry -- whether it's by the beauty of a crystal clear morning in my back yard or by the news, as we had today, of a man who lost his entire family in a bombing in Iraq. Or, both at one time.

WW: Let's step back for a minute. Are your originally from Massachusetts?
SB: No, I grew up in Chicago. But then went to Massachusetts for school and ended up staying for many years, until I had the good fortune of moving to DC.

WW: Good fortune? How do you mean?
SB: DC really feels like home to me. I've been so welcomed here. I've had the great privilege of finding and being welcomed into a rich, diverse community of poets and activists that has sustained me through these past several years.

WW: Where did you first find your passion for activism? Chicago? Boston?
SB: I was raised in an activist family. One of my first memories is marching down State Street in Chicago with my father, protesting the Vietnam War. He was a member of Veterans for Peace and I have very warm memories of those times together, hanging out with the other vets. So, it's who I am.

WW: Tell me about Whiskey in the Garden of Eden and how that merges the two worlds you described--poetry and activism.
Whiskey in the Garden of Eden is my first book, so it includes poems from many of the past 10 years or so. The first section, called "Wild Peace", contains poems I've written since being in DC. They grapple with the changing city (and being part of that change...), the war, and the challenges of raising a child in a time of war. They often entwine the personal and the political.

Other poems in the book reflect on my Chicago childhood in the late 60s and early 70s -- another time of rapid change and war. And other poems are about motherhood and love and loss. But because of who I am, as someone introducing me once said, the world always is present even in the very personal poems.

Look for the second part of Sarah Browning's interview in a few days. In it she discusses how she approaches writing and how publishing has impacted her work.

Weirding Word (SM), a division of G.L. Honeycutt Consulting, LLC, helps you communicate your ideas and information more effectively through tailored editing, freelance writing, publication and web design services.

Copyright 2007-2008 Gaea L. Honeycutt All rights reserved.