Essays from my Substack The Imaginative Territory appear in the first column.  

Whose Odyssey?

Whose Odyssey?

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

I’m fortunate to live close to one of the 41 theaters worldwide that are able to project an IMAX 70 mm print, the painstaking format Christopher Nolan chose for his new version of The Odyssey. As I wait for my reserved ticket date, I’ve been thinking back to my undergraduate reading of Homer’s poem. And I

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The Universe in a Pink Notebook

The Universe in a Pink Notebook

Octavia Butler quote from the novel Fledgling as shown in A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler by Lynell George

Octavia Butler said science fiction was “a handful of earth and a handful of sky and everything around and between.” In Lynell George’s book of the same title, which explores Butler’s archives and life, that

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The Hidden Story at Work

The Hidden Story at Work

Organizations are always conveying messages, including some that are not intentional. In my 30 years working in strategic communications, I’ve seen how the stories organizations tell, or simply allow to persist, function as operating instructions for what is possible. Some of these stories aren’t given much thought, and the unexamined ones can be

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The Person She Is Out There

The Person She Is Out There

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Photo by Robert Boston on Unsplash

Kelsey Pfendler is on track to become the first American woman to row solo and unsupported across the mid-Pacific Ocean from California to Hawaii. She may also become the fastest rower ever to make the

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The Stage She Made Larger

The Stage She Made Larger

California Eagle, March 1, 1945 (private collection)

Charlotta Bass’s husband would sometimes warn her that she was going to get him killed. She would remind him it would be for a good cause. In her memoir she mentions a night when eight members of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to enter the locked door of her office at the California Eagle, then

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Laura's Blog
The Pretty, Unfinished State

When I’m painting, I nearly always like the first, sketchy draft of a piece the [...]

Authoring Perfection

Photo: Nadia Comaneci, 1976, credit agerpres archives via Wikimedia Commons Though 50 years have passed, [...]

Irises

Irises, 14 x 11, oil on canvas panel. My daughter sacrificed these irises for me, [...]