Pragmatic Magic

(where I talk about work and what makes a rockstar)

(courtesy Nick Smith and this terrifies me)

Most of my adult life, my working life, I’ve been a career heretic. Meaning, I question a lot of long-held truths about the “ways things work” when it comes to being a professional. Like wearing suits, or adhering to a strict 8-to-5, or creating divisions between personal and professional lives. What does that even mean? It should be one life, in my estimation. Those are all little rebellions, and I’ve not gone to the mat for them, at least in any public way, and I’m not unique for the way I’ve behaved, though I may have been more vocal about it than others. Like my fear of spreadsheets and budgets. People know my resistance is legendary, mainly due to math trauma. It’s real. IYKYN.

So, what do I do? Who am I in the world of work?

Professionally, I am a creative strategist, writer, and producer who specializes in transformational storytelling for resource development and I’ve focused my career in the arts, primarily theatre and media.  My super-powers include co-building space for creative people to tell their stories, conflict management, and community building. I use human systems processes, improvisational theater forms, change management, and good old-fashioned relationship building to find stories and get them out into the world all while raising resources to support them and the organizations they grow within. 

I’ve had the pleasure of working at some wonderful nonprofits over my 25 year career such as Southern Oregon PBS, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Britt Music and Arts Festival, as well as The University of Texas at Austin, Production4Use, and The Women’s Community Center of Central Texas. I’ve curated and produced over 11 years of storytelling, comedy, and improv events in Austin, Dallas, D.C, San Francisco, Ashland, and in Canada including LAFF, 14/48 Austin, BedPost Confessions and (un)Spoken and I’ve adored every moment.

Here? I’m also a writer, advice giver, witness to systems good and bad, and what I consider “The Crone In Your Corner.” Crone? Because I’ve hit that age and I love the idea of leveling up into wise(ish) person territory. I’ve built a lot of nonprofit development systems, creative spaces, and I’d love to tell the tales to help others avoid pitfalls and thrive in their journeys. I also just like to write about things I’ve experienced since, in my mind? They all relate to one another.

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I write essays about many things, ranging from the personal to professional, with a particular focus on theatre and media. These things all have one thing in common- I write about how human systems work, or don’t work, in healthy and unhealthy ways. It’s mostly what humans do, right? Meet with each other in little or big groups? Even gathering by ourselves, alone, counts in this venture. We meet, and that’s why this is called Morning Meeting, but if you join us in the evenings that’s wonderful too!

My posts are generally broken down like this: 

1. Posts on leadership, followership, power, culture and community, often starting from the personal perspective of my own life. 

2. Advice or thoughts on nonprofit management and development, producing and why administration is just as much of an “art” as art is itself.

3. A weekly link roundup called Sunday Market  to connect you to other writers I love, and fun things I found during the previous 7 days. Browse around and see what’s good.

4. Happy Hour Thoughts which can be anything, really, from the sacred to profane, from the mundane to the rage-posts.

My career, as I’ve laid it out above, falls loosely into the arena of arts management. I’ve worked in a number of arts organizations, and created and led others. My skills and interests have led me to produce (and manage) and raise money for those productions.  I gather up people, places, things, money in the hopes that we make something awesome together.

Andrew Taylor puts it perfectly here, 

“Arts Management is the practice of aggregating and animating people, money, and stuff toward expressive ends.”

I love his Substack and what I adore about it is his ability to show the pragmatic magic that makes up the art itself. Not the singing or dancing or painting or writing, but the behind the scenes support, which is so often ignored or unseen in favor of the “MAGIC” onstage. Which, of course, is what people are there to see. Why do I say pragmatic magic? And in regards to say…budgeting or event planning? Because there is art and grace and talent involved in that just as much as performing a monologue. There can be magic embedded in the down-to-earth, sensible, methodical administration of an arts organization, just like there is some rational, matter-of-fact, detailed pragmatism involved in getting a performance up on its feet. It’s generally the part that no one sees or pays attention to, yet without it an organization might fail, and an actor might not know their blocking or lines. 

Behind a “star” are those whose work is a pragmatic magic-those who administrate, those who create very sensible budgets and systems within which and on top of which is where the outward facing mission happens, allowing the show to go on. For every live show you see, a movie you watch (maybe taking up to three hours max) there were thousands of hours of that pragmatic magic to get it up on stage or screen. And I know that this particular polarity happens in every single field. Think about medicine. Surgeons are rockstars! But they couldn’t do what they do without a full chorus of talented medical staff, and then THEY couldn’t be as safe, efficient, and streamlined without a talented administration to shore them up. These are the stories I’m interested in right now, and how the imbalance can ruin really good things. I’ll leave you with a grand example of what I’m talking about, again, from Arts Managed and Andrew Taylor.

“But a budget is also a story told in currency and categories. It shapes and is shaped by the organization’s assumptions about how work is organized and how it moves. It’s a morality story, since it defines what is worthy of funding and what is not. And it’s a persuasive document used to rally resources and convince collaborators that the plan can be accomplished.

In short, a budget is a complex work of human expression – clinical and expressive, practical and theoretical all at once”

I say this as someone who has dyscalculia and the aforementioned fear of numbers, this made me want to start writing budgets in narrative so that I could see and feel and hear that, as he puts it, craft if not art. I think a good budget must be art, because without it things fall apart and then no one gets to play. I realize writing a budget in narrative won’t work for most organizations, but like I said, I tend towards the rebellious, and if a little bit of storytelling gets me less afraid to wrangle a spreadsheet, I’m all for it. Maybe I’ll even fall in love a little bit.

(courtesy antgirl)

Where do you find pragmatic magic in your life?  Where has the lack of support for it meant things in your workplace (or life) fell apart?