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Community Organizing in a Triple-Headed Crisis

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 16:38:54 +0000

This blog is an attempt to convince community leaders and organizers that writing can be another tool in their power toolbox. It offers examples and suggestions on how to write both artfully and effectively. I have been a publisher for over thirty years and a community leader and organizer for almost fifty years, so the combination of these two topics is a natural for me, as in this piece.

When Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “…the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens,” he could have been describing the response of community organizers and leaders to the triple-headed (coronavirus pandemic, economic collapse, and racial reckoning) crisis of 2020. (1)

Community organizing is based on building relationships of trust among people who often do not even know one another. But building trust is tough when you cannot have one-to-one, face-to-face relational meetings, are not allowed to run events involving more than 15-25-50 participants, or have no public way to hold politicians and other power brokers accountable.

Here’s the good news: Organizers and community leaders in Illinois and around the country did NOT stop organizing; we adapted. We adapted by using new technology—such as Zoom, Facetime, podcasts, blogs, social media. We adapted by using old technology—such as newspapers, books, magazines, audio books. And we adapted by figuring out how to vote, get out the vote, and continue pressing people in positions of power.

For example, a group of 500 leaders and their supporters, representing 100 people’s institutions in the four-county Chicago-land area, met at Dominican University in River Forest on Sunday afternoon, October 25, with Don Harmon, the new president of the Illinois State Senate on criminal justice reform, including the incarceration of those caught up in non-violent episodes caused by mental illness or substance addiction, and reclaiming communities that have been devastated by decades of neglect or manipulation. Only a dozen of us were live—masked and properly-distanced from the senator and his one aide. The other 490 or so of us were participating in the event via Zoom. Senator Harmon agreed to work seriously with us on all our issues.

Likewise, on Saturday, September 26, in North Lawndale outside the original Sears Tower on Homan Avenue, a group of 50 members of several homeowners’ groups in the area—also distanced and masked and carrying with them the names of 200 other supportive residents who were following the proceedings on Facebook—met with their Chicago alderman, Michael Scott, Jr., and won his support for an ambitious-but-doable drive to build 1000 new affordable homes in their community. At the end of the meeting, Alderman Scott told the group, “Why stop at 1000? Let’s build 3000!”

For me as the owner of a small publishing house in Andersonville, the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders, while challenging financially, also offered the opportunity, time, and motivation to compile, edit, and publish a 400-page collection of some 50 stories, essays, poems, letters, and other writings by community organizers and leaders who reflected on their own experiences of “power and powerlessness.” This allowed me to encourage new people to write and publish for the first time, as well as to find hidden gems from American history that are not well known by the current crop of community organizers and leaders.

During 2020, organizers and leaders have discovered many new ways to work across divisions of geography, race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, economic circumstance, religion, philosophy, and even political ideology. The triple-headed crisis has laid bare the deep and serious inequalities and prejudices in our current democracy so many have taken for granted for so long. And there is a growing recognition that the pressures on individuals (especially young people), families (of all makes and models), and people’s institutions (both religious and secular) can only be relieved, as de Tocqueville insisted, by “the quality of functions performed by private citizens.”

1. Democracy in America, 1835-1840

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce is the CEO and Publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago. He has worked for over 50 years with affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation, formed in Chicago by Saul Alinsky and others in 1940. Pierce is the compiler and editor of Reveille for a New Generation: Organizers and Leaders Reflect on Power, published on November 3, 2020. He can be reached at gfapierce@actapublications.com or at 773-590-3801.

A Call to Reflection

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 11:19:25 +0000

The idea that change usually comes incrementally, over a long period of time, as people build their own organizations that can then address the root causes of social problems (“root” being the very definition of the word radical) is newly relevant during the triple-headed crisis we are going through in the world today. The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), with which I have been connected for over 50 years, has certainly been a proponent of this approach. We try to break “problems” down into “issues” that we can “do something about” with the “power that we have” or “the power they think we have.”

Why do we take this approach? I believe we have to think about and discuss this now, before the pandemic is over, before the election of 2020 is decided, before we try to address the problems of racism and racial inequality, before we tackle the problems of a failed economy. Before we return to “normal,” that is: There will be a new “normal,” and we need to prepare our response to it.

As a starting place, I have been thinking about what has made the IAF approach unique and compelling over at least the eighty years of its existence since its formation by Alinsky in 1940. I have been helped in this by my current role in trying to get IAF leaders and organizers to write about their experiences. This fall, my publishing house, ACTA Publications, will publish two books. The first is Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime in Organizing by Arnie Graf, one of the most authentic practitioners and teachers of the universal principles of the IAF; the second is Reveille for a New Generation: Organizers and Leaders Reflect on Power, which is my compilation of some 45 essays by predecessors of the IAF, founders of the IAF, and new leaders and organizers of the present-day IAF.

Here is what I understand about the “IAF” approach to organizing: It is built on these five “pillars” or “universal principles”:

1. To be effective over the long haul, IAF organizations must be non-partisan. Not “non-political,” but not beholden in any way to elected officials or political parties, including taking their money or endorsing their candidates.

2. To be effective in the long haul, IAF organizations must be diverse in as many ways as humanly possible in each situation: by race, ethnicity, faith and philosophy, political persuasion, economic circumstances, education levels, gender identity, sexual orientation, geography, etc. This diversity must be real not token, non-negotiable, and absolutely non-exclusionary.

3. To be effective over the long haul, IAF organizations must be either made up of “people’s institutions” (defined as institutions that the people who are members have—or should have—control over) or be new people’s institutions that are organized with all the elements of other people’s institutions (i.e., organized people and organized money) such as labor unions, not-for-profit service providers, ethnic and civil rights organizations.

4. To be effective over the long haul, IAF organizations must be based on “relational” power rather than “dominant” power. This kind of power is developed through the IAF practice of one-to-one and small-group relational meetings. “We build relationships now so we will have them when we need them,” is the IAF mantra.

5. To be effective over the long haul, IAF organizations must follow the “Iron Rule”: Never do for people what they can do for themselves. Thus, IAF organizations are based on a long tradition of leadership training and development, reflection and mentoring, reading and power analysis, and action and evaluation.

This blog is meant to get this conversation started as we all hit the ground running on November 4, 2020, and beyond. Do any of these five pillars or universal principles of the IAF approach to organizing need to be changed or tweaked? As we recruit new member institutions or build new affiliates, as we look for and develop new leaders and organizers, as we get into new and effective action on a wide range of issues, as we think regionally and nationally as well as locally, as we confront our own weaknesses and failings, are these the universal principles we need to restate and recommit to? Are there any other pillars that need to be added?

If you are interested in joining this dialogue, please send me a response of about 1000 words (the length of this piece). I ask only that you focus your comments on this question: What makes the IAF approach to organizing described above unique and compelling to you? Be specific. Give examples. Tell stories.

Greg Pierce is the supervisor of the Illinois affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation, with which he has been connected as an organizer, leader, and mentor for fifty years. He is the compiler and editor of Reveille for a New Generation, the developer and facilitator of the workshop “Persuasive Writing for Community Leaders and Organizers,” and the publisher of a series of reflections on organizing published by ACTA Publications, www.actapublications.com. He can be reached at gfapierce@aol.com or 773-590-3801.

What Native Americans Can Teach the Nation at This Moment in Our Collective History?

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 10:58:36 +0000

The community organizers and leaders of the Illinois affiliates of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation are reading together The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, the insightful, award-winning, bestselling, 500-page book by David Treuer, Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in norther Minnesota.

Native Americans are being especially hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic and economic collapse and have many things to teach all Americans about the treatment of minorities by law enforcement and government and society in the midst of national protests following the killing of George Floyd. In the epilogue to his book Treuer, who proudly uses the term “Indian” for his people, asks the following questions that resonate directly with today’s headlines.

What kind of country do we want to be? Is this government of ours one that should merely get out of the way so that American can once again be, in Ronald Reagan’s words, a place “in which people can still get rich”? Or is our government meant to be the angel (avenging or otherwise) of our better nature?

It has always bothered me that the very idea of paying attention to or knowing Indian history is tinged with the soft compassion of the do-gooder, as a kind of voluntary public service, like volunteering at an after-school program. But if we treat Indian stories this way, we do more than relegate Indians themselves to history—as mattering only in relation to America’s deep and sometimes dark past. We also miss the full measure of the country itself. If you want to know America—if you want to see it for what it was and what it is—you need to look at Indian history and at the Indian present. If you do, if we all do, we will see that all the issues posed at the found of the country have persisted:

How do the rights of many relate to the rights of the few?
What is or should be the furthest extent of federal power?
How has the relationship between the government and the individual evolved?
What are the limits of the executive to execute policy, and to what extent does that matter to us as we go about our daily lives?
How do we reconcile the stated ideals of America as a country given to violent acts against communities and individuals?
To what degree do we privilege enterprise over people?
To what extent does the judiciary shape our understanding of our place as citizens in this country? To what extent should it?What are the limits to the state’s power over the people living within its borders?

To ignore the history of Indians in America is to miss how power itself works.

David Treuer teaches at the University of Southern California. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is available from ACTA Publications, www.actapublications.com.

An excerpt from Treuer's book will be featured in Reveille for a New Generation. This collection of essays on leadership and power will be published the day after the presidential election. No matter who wins, it will be very relevant.

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce is the publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago and the author of many books, including The World as It Should Be and Spirituality at Work. He runs “intensive immersion” workshops on writing for specific kinds of writers, such as the “Writing for Community Leaders and Organizers.” For more information, contact him at gfapierce@actapublications.com or 800-397-2282.

ACTA's Community Organizing Series

Other Organizing Resources from ACTA

Comfort in This Time of Crisis

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:11:11 +0000

Friends,

Here is a poem by John Shea that I have found to be comforting to myself and others in this time of crisis. You have permission to send it to others if you think it might help them as well.

Stay as safe and well as possible. Help one another any way you can.

Greg Pierce

President and Publisher

ACTA Publications

Spirits Arrive

by John Shea

Like God,

Bidden or unbidden,

spirits will arrive….

We know who they are—

family, friends,

anyone who ever wandered

into the welcome of our smile.

They only hunger now

for a moment of our memory.

But be assured,

their mission is not to haunt.

They will not enter in the usual way.

Do not listen for the doorbell.

Do not wait for a card.

Do not scan your e-mails.

Do not check spam.

They appear from inside,

when our minds are too exhausted

to block entry

and we have given up

fighting back tears.

Too often we push them away,

insisting over and over again,

“They are gone. They are gone.”

We hug our loss to our heart.

Missing the point:

they are sent

as a hallelujah chorus

to sing us out of this narrow box

we mistake for the fullness of life.

Excerpted from the poem “Spirits at Christmas”

from the book Seeing Haloes by John Shea,

Available at www.actapublications.com or 800-397-2282.

Reveille for a New Generation

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 14:01:52 +0000

I have been organizing for 50 years, at times as a paid organizer and the rest of the time as a volunteer leader with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), an organization founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky which now has 60 affiliated organizations around the country, with a few in other countries as well. I am now the part-time supervisor of the four Metro IAF affiliates in Illinois, in addition to my work as the publisher of ACTA Publications.

The IAF trains people and the institutions they control about what we call “relational power” across the divisions of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, economics, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. You can learn more about the IAF at www.industrialareasfoundation.org. It has over a hundred full-time, trained organizers and is looking for more. We are especially proactive in recruiting people in their thirties and forties who are interested in organizing as a possible career. (You might even be or know someone who might be interested in this kind of work if so, contact me.)

I periodically offer a workshop on “Writing for Organizers and Leaders.” As part of that effort, I am compiling and editing a new book titled Reveille for a New Generation: Organizers and Leaders Reflect on Power. The book will contain about 50 first-person story-essays of 1000-2500 words and will be divided into three sections. Part One is material prior to the 1940s. It includes reflections on power and powerlessness by people like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Lucretia Mott, Emma Lazarus, Lucy Gonzáles Parsons, Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman), Mother Jones, John L. Lewis, Stoyan Pribichevich, and Pauli Murray.

The writings in Part Two are from IAF organizers and leaders active in the 1940s-1990s, including Saul Alinsky, Ed Chambers, Cesar Chavez, Mike Gecan, Ernesto Cortes, Christine Stephens, Arnie Graf, Lionel Edmunds, Jeff Krehbiel, and Zeik Saidman.

Part Three features more current IAF organizers and leaders, including Perry Perkins, Paul Turner, Adrienne McCauley, Dean Daida, and Cynthia Marshall.

The Afterword or Epilogue (I hope) will be an excerpt from the new book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present by Indian (his word of choice) writer David Treuer, an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee was a finalist for last year’s National Book Awards. I hope his essay will bring my book full circle on reflecting on the question of people’s power and powerlessness from the founding of the United States to the present.

Reveille for a New Generation will be published the day after the presidential election (no matter who wins, it will be very relevant). I will be including excerpts from the book on this blog going forward. Let me know what you think at gfapierce@actapublications.com or 800-397-2282.

ACTA's Community Organizing Series

Other Organizing Resources from ACTA

A Story for What Ails Us

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 13:52:03 +0000

A Christmas Carol was written by Charles Dickens in 1843 and is one of the most beloved stories in the world.

Unfortunately, it is so familiar that most of us miss its basic message when we see it on stage, screen, or television each Christmas season. That message? Mean-spiritedness and miserliness make us miserable…but it is not too late for us to change.

Ebenezer Scrooge is the perfect character for most Americans today. He could be any one of us: cranky, disillusioned, wanting to be left alone to stew in our own strongly-held juices about what is wrong with the world and just about everyone else. We are done trying to help, trying to do the right thing, trying to make the world a better place! Are there no prisons, are there no poorhouses that can make all our problems go away (or at least hide from our sight)?

Like Scrooge, we need something to get us out of our funk. We need to be visited by three ghosts: The Ghost of Who We Were, the Ghost of Who We Are, and the Ghost of Who We Could Be.

We as Americans used to be better than we have been recently. Oh, sure, we have been worse, too, but there was a certain civility to our affairs that most of us at least striven for most of the time. We didn’t always think that for me to be up, someone else had to be down. As a nation we said, with Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses longing to be free.” At our best, we were capable of kindness and generosity and selflessness. Is that not the Ghost of Who We Were?

And the Ghost of Who We Are, is that not still alive as well? We still catch glimpses of ourselves as we really want to be: people who haven’t given up, who still fight the good fight, who are out there every day working for the common good and standing for the whole. We see it especially in some of our young people, and in some of our elders, and even in some of us in the middle. They are the people we really admire, the ones we still wish we could be like, the ones who refuse to buy into our new culture of confrontation and denigration and lowered expectations, the ones who don’t think it is all about money and personal power and hatred of anyone who disagrees with them. That Spirit is still among us.

As is the Ghost of Who We Could Be. Like Scrooge, the dark shadows we see in our future are not necessarily those of things that will be, but only of things that might be. We still have time to change them. It can still be Christmas Day when we wake up. But wake up we must. And when we wake up, we then have to act differently in our public and private lives.

“You’re an old Scrooge!” we say when we really want to put someone down (which seems to be more and more often these days). But really, the message of Dickens’ story is that we all need to become more like the post-ghostly-visits Scrooge who “became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good city, town, or borough, in the good old world.”

“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge.”

Read the introduction to ACTA's edition of A Christmas Carol by master story-teller John Shea.

Related Titles

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and introduced by John Shea (Supplies Limited)
Charles Dickens, Illuminated by The Message
Starlight: Beholding the Christmas Miracle All Year Long (Supplies Limited)
John Shea’s Christmas Stories
And a wide variety of Christmas CDs

Class of '69: Reunion and Renewal

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 11:27:23 +0000

Vatican II. Vietnam. Assassinations. Race riots. Chicago Democratic Convention. Nixon. Dump the Hump. Mandatory weekly Sunday-evening talks by Fr. Eugene Kennedy, MM, on the beauties of celibacy. Six hundred seminarians packed 2-3 to a room when we arrived in 1965; 120 seminarians, each practically with his own wing of the building by the time we graduated in 1969.

You’d think a class that went through all that and more at Maryknoll College Seminary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, would find all kinds of reasons to go our separate ways. And in most ways, we did. But thanks to the faithful and persistent efforts of a few members—notably Ed Peterson, Mike Purcell, Terry O’Conner, and others—this class has somehow managed to get together at least every five years for five decades. Up to 35 of us from a graduating class not much larger than that, along with our spouses and even a couple of young adults from the next generation who wanted to see what their parents were constantly talking about, have attended one or several or all of these reunions.

Somehow we arrived at our fiftieth-anniversary reunion last summer. We had all gotten a lot older (now in our seventies); several of our classmates have passed away; we have lost contact with many; and yet there we were. One priest from our class, Fr. Scott Harris, MM, joined us and celebrated Mass. (Our class did, in fact, produce several priests, including an eventual superior general of Maryknoll, Fr. John Sivalon, MM.) There were also several deacons, as well as an assortment of practicing lay Catholics, a few Protestants, and maybe an agnostic or two.

What was really amazing is that all the members of the class and their spouses clearly had found a vocation and pursued it. In addition to the handful of priests and deacons, our class produced people who had been called to be counselors, lawyers, social workers, teachers and educators, businesspeople, community and union organizers, doctors and nurses, artists and writers, spouses and parents and grandparents. Every one of us carried out the central thing we had been taught by Maryknoll: that it is our job to help bring about Christ’s vision of the reign of God “on Earth as it is in Heaven.” So the four years we spent together at Maryknoll College had been successful, even though most of had never been ordained and the seminary building itself has been torn down and replaced by million-dollar homes called “Maryknoll Estates.” (There is a delicious irony in that for some.)

We met in Chicago for a weekend in May; had a few meals and a couple of drinks; took a bus tour to Andersonville and Lincoln Park and Little Italy; got to know one another yet again and maybe really for the first time; mourned the most recent death of one of us (Greg Towle); and welcomed back someone who left the seminary as a sophomore and not one of us had seen in 52 years (Jim Colasacco). We were all over the place in terms of religious and political ideology, but we joined in a two-hour celebration of our communion with one another and with Jesus of Nazareth, who was there as well.

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce, Maryknoll College Class of 1969, is the publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago and the author of many books, including The World as It Should Be and Spirituality at Work. He runs “intensive immersion” workshops on writing for specific kinds of writers, such as the “Writing for Community Leaders and Organizers.” For more information, contact him at gfapierce@actapublications.com or 800-397-2282.

Three Lessons for Writing on Organizing

Fri, 08 Nov 2019 18:51:00 +0000

Writing is to organizing as preaching is to religion: We have to do it well if we hope to build the organization/congregation.

That was the theme of the second “Writing for IAF Organizers and Leaders” workshop I ran over Indigenous People’s Day weekend in Chicago from October 13-15, 2019. The workshop participants included 7 organizers and 5 leaders from Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Illinois.

LESSON NUMBER ONE

Write a good opening sentence.

In an introductory exercise, participants were asked to pick a great opening sentence listed in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2013. Half the group chose this sentence from Kiese Laymon’s “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.”

“I’ve had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies—once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself.”

This led, by popular demand, to a reading of the entire essay, done with great passion and eloquence by organizer Terrell Williams of BUILD in Baltimore.

LESSON NUMBER TWO

Learn how to tell a good story.

In an informal setting on Monday night each participant told one or more stories to the rest of the group, stories that all agreed needed to be written and shared with a larger audience.

LESSON NUMBER THREE

Are you convinced that writing well would increase your personal and organizational power?

This was the primary question I asked at the end of the intensive 48 hours. Other questions followed:

How would they find the time and develop the discipline to write?
How would they learn to edit multiple drafts, develop a personal or organizational style sheet, and write with multiple authors in an organization?
How would they get their work published (even if self-publishing is the only option)?
How would they get people to read their work, and how could build it build their organizations?

To be continued.

Gregory F. Augustine Pierce is the publisher of ACTA Publications in Chicago and the author of many books, including The World as It Should Be and Spirituality at Work. He runs “intensive immersion” workshops on writing for specific kinds of writers, such as the “Writing for Community Leaders and Organizers.” For more information, contact him at gfapierce@actapublications.com or 800-397-2282.

Check out our latest titles in ACTA's Community Organizing Series:

How to Raise Money for Community Organizing by Robert Connolly

Raising Money for Your Congregation by Robert Connolly

Writing for Community Organizers & Leaders 2

Tue, 14 May 2019 16:17:29 +0000

“Love your neighbor,” the Teacher taught.

I asked the Teacher, “Who is my neighbor?”

“A Somalian was on the road from Mugadishu to Hobyo along the coast of the Somali Sea when she came upon a man who had been beset by robbers and thrown into a ditch. She picked the man up, put him in the back of her pickup truck, and drove him to the nearest healthcare facility. She paid the man’s fees, continued on her way, and on the way back stopped to check on his well-being.”

“What happened next?” I asked the Teacher.

“A week later, on the same route, the woman came upon another man who had been beset by robbers and thrown into a ditch, and she did the same things for him. Then a week after that, on the same route, the same series of events happened. Then the following week…. And the week after that…. The Somalian woman was a good neighbor and always helped each of these people.”

“How long,” I asked the Teacher, “did this go on?”

“Eventually, the woman realized that what was really needed was to make the road safe for everyone. She began to organize all the groups connected to the road, starting with her own extended family, then the congregation she attended, then other religious institutions of all faiths up and down the road. They formed The Committee for a Safe Road from Mugadishu to Hobyo.They recruited businesses and farms and labor unions and not-for-profit organizations and other institutions of good will in Somalia to back them. They approached law enforcement officials and healthcare providers to be on their side. They called for a series of meetings that was attended by hundreds of people, and all the local politicians and the governor of the province and eventually even the president of the country were there. The people demanded that the road be made safe for everyone, and eventually it was. Then they formed a permanent organization, United Power for a Better Somalia, to make sure that the road remained safe. This organization went to deal successfully with many other issues in Somalia. And they thanked the Good Somalian for organizing them to become real neighbors to one another.”

Writing for Community Organizers & Leaders

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 11:48:20 +0000

When my wife, Kathy, and I need some work done around the house, I tell her, “You call a professional and I’ll write an article about it.” So here it is.

We recently needed a bunch of carpentry done in a new loft we are building out in a 100-year-old warehouse where I have run my publishing house for over thirty years. The woodwork we needed was funky, difficult, diverse, and…oh, we didn’t have much money to spend on it.

So we asked Dave the Plumber (that’s the name for him on my cell phone) if he knew a good carpenter who could “fit the bill,” so to speak. That’s how we met Tony the Carpenter (cell phone name) and I learned ten things about writing, some I had forgotten and some I had never thought of.

Normally I wouldn’t get to spend a full day closely observing someone like Tony. Usually plumbers, electricians, masons, carpenters, and other craftspeople charge extra if I want to help (smile). But in this case, to do his work Tony had to have someone—anyone—watch his tools on the busy city street outside the apartment as he ran (sometimes literally) back and forth, measuring, cutting, finishing, and installing the wood. He was worried about two things: someone getting hurt on one of the many electric saws and sanders and nail guns he was using, or some passerby stealing the same. (He had twice had his equipment stolen in this way; once he lost $38,000 in tools and the other time a guy went to prison for fifteen years.)

And thus I became the designated security guard for about ten hours on a Saturday, sitting on a chair on the sidewalk outside the building, drinking coffee, and noting how Tony goes about his business. I eventually began to realize I was learning several lessons—not so much about carpentry (I’d be terrified to try to do what Tony does with such confidence and art)—but about writing and teaching writing, which I do a lot.

Here are ten short lessons about writing I learned from Tony the Carpenter that day:

Love Writing. Tony loves carpentry. He told me this has been true since he was eleven (he’s now 39, married with five kids). He described how he used to be late for elementary school because he would stop by construction sites to watch the workers and lose track of the time. For us writers, if we don’t learn to love the act of writing, we won’t do it.

Write with Discipline. Tony has another full-time job as a supervisor for a masonry company, which he does not love but does pay well, but he still does freelance carpentry on the side because he loves it. As writers, we may well have other work that pays better, but if we love to write we have to grab time when we can to do it. And when we grab the time we should always make good use of it.

Value the Tools of Writing. Tony has only the best tools (mostly DeWalt brand), and he took about an hour to lay them out just so. (He told me that when he was a kid he had left his tool belt laying in the yard and his grandfather had found it and hidden it from him for a month to teach him a lesson.) Writers have tools as well: paper, pens and pencils, word processors, dictionaries, thesauri, books on writing, books of writing, the Internet. When we write, these should be laid out around us like DeWalts around a carpenter.

Write When and What You Can. Right now, Tony can only work part-time as a carpenter. Rather than bemoan that fact, he grabs whatever time and opportunity he can to work with wood. Writers are great bemoaners. “If only I had the time….” We’ve got to grab the time, even if it means skipping the latest episode of Game of Thrones or getting up an hour earlier to write (as I did today for this article).

“Measure Twice; Cut Once.” This is every carpenter’s first commandment, one I saw Tony follow many times in one day. I thought about how this relates to writers and decided our first commandment should be “Cut many times; measure at end.” This opposite-of-carpentry commandment comes from the different nature of writing. Our job is to get words on a page first, edit ourselves mercilessly, and only measure the result when we are finished. We must use as many words as we need, and not a word more…or less. This one needed 1399, in my opinion. (If you want more on this rule, read John McPhee’s fine book on the craft of writing, Draft #4.)

Create Work-Arounds. We had a special framed shelf we wanted Tony to make for our new place. The length of the four sides was a total of 16 feet and the depth was twelve inches, but Tony had brought wood that was only eleven inches wide. Rather than run out to the lumber yard (which I most certainly would have done), Tony simply cut four one-inch pieces of wood and glued, then nailed, and then sanded them smooth, making the eleven-inch boards into perfect twelve-inch boards. It took him some time (not as much as a trip to the store), but it was also more economical and more artistic. No one will ever be able to tell what he did, except me and him. Writers need to do the same kind of work-arounds with words instead of wood.

Take Regular (Short) Breaks; Get Back to Writing. Tony took a few minutes about every hour. That’s the only time I got to talk with him. He’d have a cigarette (not a break I’d recommend), accept a water or soda (no food), and went to the bathroom (a total of one time in ten hours). After 3-5 minutes, he’d go right back to work. Writers need to take regular breaks as well, but we don’t have to let them turn into distractions.

Finish Something. Tony had ten hours, and he was committed to getting our job done. (He stayed an extra hour to do so. He did so for his own purposes, but he also wanted Kathy and I to see a “finished” product.) Yes, there were a few things we still need him to do, but the job was “done.” Writers need to finish something: a chapter, an essay, a first draft, even a page or a paragraph so that we have a feeling of accomplishment every time we write. How do we know we have done that? We show it to someone—a spouse, a friend, a colleague, if necessary to a parent or sibling or adult child. Better yet, we send it off to a publisher.

Throw away the Junk. When he was almost done, I asked Tony if he wanted to take all the small pieces of wood that were left over. I meant it as an offer, but he took it as a task I wanted him to do. “It’s all junk, but I can haul it away for you,” he said. Sometimes are writing just isn’t that good. Or sometimes some of it is not that good. We don’t have to store it in the garage or our computers. We can throw it away, as I did with the wood.

Clean Up Immediately. Even after a long day, Tony took the time to clean up his tools and workplace. (I helped a lot by sweeping up the sawdust on the sidewalk.) It struck me that the next time he had the chance to carpenter, he was ready to go. Writers need to clean up when we are done as well. Save what we’ve written. Print out a copy. Send it by email, at least to ourselves. And, in Tony’s honor, clean up our desks and offices.