Business of design
In a world of texts, chats and tweets there lives a writer…..
…. one who chooses her words carefully, one who is confident enough in her writing to slow the reader down, to ask for a moment of their time. One who crafts the text she writes like a painter measures every brush stroke. A woman ‘in love with words’ but who, once you get to know her his equally in love with life and everything that life has to offer. Saxon Henry was only briefly a tweep before she became a very dear friend. I am privileged to call her that and I love her as much for her professional abilities as for her life force, humour, intelligence and the absolutely amazing breakfast strata she makes.
Tell us about yourself. What do you do? Where do you live?
There’s a reason I call myself a woman in love with words, and it has to do with the fact that I enjoy writing almost anything. I’ve been making “my living” as a design/architecture/design-related travel journalist and author for the past 15 years, but I also love to dig deep—writing poetry, plays, screenplays and essays over the years has sustained me when the commercial writing began to feel rote. I’ve just begun sharing my deeper work online during the past year through my blogs Roaming By Design and The Road to Promise, which is a work-in-progress memoir I’m writing about my experiences in the mission field during the 1980s and 1990s.
What’s a typical day in your life?
I live in Brooklyn, and I work at home so a typical day in my life when I’m not traveling is that I’m up early so that I can spend at least two hours on my creative writing before the Twittersphere heats up (yes, I’m one of those Modenus fans who has developed a relationship with the creators of the savvy site through Twitter). I spend most of my days at the computer, making deadlines, blogging and being involved in social media—pretty boring, I know, but that’s what it takes to put as many words “on the page” as I accomplish during any given week. One of my tweeps, @concretedetail, actually dubbed me fecund. He’s one of the smarties (I had to look it up), and I’ll take that as a compliment!
What makes you laugh? What makes you cry? What makes you happy?
I love to laugh and tend to have a bit of a goofy sense of humor. I’ve been amazed at how much entertainment is on Twitter. If you doubt that, check out the streams of @bobborson, @cupboards, @paul_anater, @dogwalkblog, @modernsauce and @alexandrafunfit (this list could go on forever so I’ve given you the crème-de-la-crème). Memorably funny movie scenes include the tennis-match skirmish in “The Other Side of the Bed” and Jeanne Moreau’s final triumph in the “Summer House.” What makes me cry? Typical schmaltzy romantic crap: yeah, I’m a total sucker for it.
Writing makes me happy. I can’t imagine doing anything else with my time and feel particularly blessed that I have the luxury of spending every day absorbed in activities that truly turn me on.
What was the inspiration for you to use Twitter as a communication platform?
My initial inspiration for using twitter was curiosity. I balked at first—being someone who values grammar, I felt the 140-character format with all of its “dumbed-down” abbreviations was going to do a disservice to language, and it very well may, but I’ve found a fantastic community on the micro-blogging site and touch base with my tweeps almost daily
Where do you want to be ten years from now?
Ten years from now, I expect to have written at least one produced feature film, a handful of produced plays (only have two under my belt so far), several published books of poems, dozens of published non-fiction books, and at least one published novel. Okay, just started hyperventilating over all the work I have to do to make this happen. Anyone got a paper bag?
