Episode 10 - Summer Reset

The host of A Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge, Kenda Faith, welcomes listeners back after taking a break. She discusses the importance of taking breaks and gives shout-outs to the Wichita Advanced Learning Library and the Barton International Group. Kenda also talks about her passion project, Faith Publishing, Inc., a nonprofit publishing company that focuses on helping underrepresented voices and creating scholarship and creative opportunities. She encourages people to join in and connect through stories. Kenda shares a mantra and announces changes to the P&P Writing Society and her collaboration with the Barton International Group. She also mentions her teaching job and the publication of four books. Hello, hello, and welcome, welcome, welcome to A Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge, a place where writing doesn't have to suck. I am your host, Kenda Faith, and also the Executive Director of Faith Publishing, Inc., the company that is sponsoring this program. So, welcome back. I hope everybody is refreshed. I certainly am. It's good to be back after taking some time just to kind of do a little reset, like a summer reset. So, today I want to address taking a much-needed break. Do whatever you can afford. But before I dive in, let me, of course, do a couple of our shout-outs. The first one is going to be at the Wichita Advanced Learning Library, the AV Studio. Thank you, thank you for having this equipment, I guess, all ready, and the staff. The staff is amazing. So, if you haven't heard, there was some, like a cybersecurity issue with the City of Wichita recently, and believe it or not, all of the systems, directory systems in the library was completely down. And I will tell you, these people are amazing. They are finding all sorts of workarounds to try to find call numbers for different books. I don't know. I just want to applaud them. And that, and of course, thank you for helping me figure out which speaker I need to work, which one I need to plug into. And of course, I also want to do a shout-out to the Barton International Group, also known as BIG. I call them, like, the BIG kids. This is a group of undergraduate and graduate students from the Barton School of Business at Wichita State University. They took on, we call it Project Faith, or, I don't know, I just think that sounds cool. It kind of reminds me of Spike Club, like Project Mayhem, Project Faith. Anyway, these people came together and they are working on consulting. And so they took my project, Faith Publishing, Inc., and we did some, I don't know, they did some amazing research and generating of ideas, and so I want to give them a shout-out. I'm so excited and working with them, and I was thrilled about their presentation, and just, oh my gosh, people, I don't know, the business world is going to be taken by storm by them. And then, of course, obviously, I want to talk about Faith Publishing, Inc., my passion, my passion project. Now, it is just my life. It's turning into my life. This is a nonprofit publishing company, and we focus on helping underrepresented voices. We want those voices to share their stories. And while we're doing that, I want to build sustainable scholarship opportunities, scholarship opportunities, and actually other creative opportunities for our community. The cool thing about this is that Faith Publishing, Inc., we are the only, the only publishing company around that is doing what we are doing, right? Not only do I want to help voices share their story, and I want to help kind of culture and help grow our authors, and I want to grow our stories, but I also want to give us opportunities that are kind of outside of just a book or reading something online, right? I would like to help college students, young people, anybody, let's just be real. I would like to help anybody find their passion. Maybe it is that business consulting, and they can help shape our board of directors or shape how we're going to be growing as a company. Maybe you are interested in becoming a book cover designer, and you want, you're interested in graphic art. Maybe you're interested in social media. I mean, the possibilities are endless, and as more spastic as I sound, I just get more and more excited. I just, I think this is a big thing, and I want people to join in, because it is so, so important that we connect. We connect through stories. Every single story matters. So, kind of, I'm going to use one of the phrases that the big group used, and they said, Together, we are the audience. Excuse me. We are the audience. We are the authors, and we are the legacy. So, every voice matters, right? Every story deserves to be heard. So, let's get together, let's inspire, and let's be inspired from each other. Yay! So, with that, before I dig into today's topics, let's do, excuse me. Apparently, that much-needed rest got me a little allergy. Anyway, let's start with a mantra. Why do we do mantras? Mantras help us kind of just see and help us focus and help us overcome. It's kind of like a self-fulfilled prophecy, right? That's like one of my favorite communication theories, is if you hear something, see something, absorb something, over and over and over again, you are going to believe it. Now, unfortunately, this happens for negative things. So, if you are told or if you are surrounded by negative messages, you actually start to believe it. Well, I like to do the counter of that because, you know, I'm rebellious like that. The counter of that is I want to be positive. I want to see what, if we keep on saying something over and over and over and over again, we are going to believe it, right? It's kind of like the, if I keep on telling you that our stories matter, everyone's going to start believing that our stories matter because they do. My creatives, let's do the mantra. Today, I will face fear. Today, I will be brave. Today, I will struggle. Today, I will grow. Today, I will get through this. Huzzah! Jazz hands. Yay! I hope you can just like hear me shaking my jazz hands back and forth. Alright, my creatives, let's get down to business. The first, again, I want to say welcome back. I've been gone. Well, kind of off the platform for a little while. Not necessarily completely gone, but I had this, I don't know, maybe like an epiphany that I can't do everything. Now, if you give me a strong cup of coffee and maybe like a cape, I really seriously think I could save the world, but I also need to think that this is not about me, you know, gathering amazing authors and ideas and whatnot. This is not about me. This is about us. And it's also about me kind of having that realization that I need to take a step back sometimes and I need to reset. I cannot do everything. So I made the executive decision to kind of take a step back in the month of May. So, what did I do? I put the P&P Writing Society on hold. Now, I don't want it to go away because I'm kind of excited about the people that show up and when we meet at Norm's Coffee Bar in Newton, Kansas, which is amazing, I kind of want to take a break and I want to switch it to some Saturday sessions. Right? I kind of want to reframe some things. I would like us to build our writing community, but I have to do that one person at a time. Or one group at a time. So I think I'm going to start doing a Saturday session. I will be posting something shortly. It's probably a calendar link. And so you can sign up. It's free. Let's just talk. Let's talk about writing. Let me read your writing. Let me see what kind of ideas that you're having. I think that is going to be really, really exciting. That way, I'm not driving somewhere. I don't really think any of this is a waste of time, but I think I just want to reframe and use our assets, I guess, time. Time is a great resource. How can we use our resources a little bit more wisely? So I want to try that. The other thing that I didn't do, well, I did do, and I mentioned it previously, is BIG. That's the Barton International Group, a consulting group. Oh my gosh, I cannot even tell you how excited I am about this. They just recently gave up a presentation. And of course, that generated more ideas. And we're kind of working on a strategic plan and maybe how to build a board. And how do we build this foundation? I want to start a writing revolution, people. This is amazing. The more people I talk to about their stories, I am just enamored. And so I'm kind of going to put some more things up to you, my creative listeners. How can we build something? Build something and become part of this foundation? Maybe you know an attorney who really likes poetry or who likes to tell tales. Or maybe you know an accountant. Which, seriously, accountants are something else. A different breed of people. Maybe they have this love for sci-fi. Or maybe they just like storytelling. Maybe you are a master at social media and you're like, I need to share my talents. Yeah, contact us. In the fall, the big consulting group will be looking at trying to gather or trying to put a lasso around my ideas, if you can visualize that. And maybe we can put them in order because my superpower of attention deficit only goes so far. So I want to incorporate other people. So if you have some ideas, share them. Yeah, let's jump on board. Let's get on this cracked out crazy train and let's start something or let's build something amazing. The other thing I did do, so if you didn't know, I teach creative writing, I teach the rhetoric of horror, and I teach English at Newton High School, which I absolutely love. And May is a crazy time for teachers. I had a senior class and we had graduation. I had a daughter that graduated, so yay to that. I also had vinyls to grade and write. And I also published four books. I did not do all the work, but I'm really excited. One is called Cold. It's by Connor Reed. It's kind of a dystopic soldier story of sorts. I'm really excited to see how people react to this novel. It's his first, and what's even more amazing about Connor's work is that it won a silver key at the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition. And if you guys don't know what that is, it's massively huge. It is a big, big, big a big writing competition. It's a national competition. And just to kind of give you the breadth of it, other works or other authors that have come from that program, Stephen King, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Sylvia Platt, the list goes on. You have some amazing writers compete in this when they were in high school. I can only imagine where Connor is going to go with this. I'm thrilled about that. Another book that we did this past May was called The Intermachinations of a Messed Up Mind. And like I said earlier, I and another colleague teach a class called The Rhetoric of Horror. While I don't necessarily like being scared, when I was younger, oh heck yeah! I totally loved horror stories and flicks. Things have changed as I am aging. So I really like analyzing it. In our inaugural bout, I suppose, is we decided to have the students write their own horror stories. So with this class in particular, myself and Ryan Copper decided we were going to study five different horror tropes. So we have the bad place. That's going to be kind of like a haunted house. We have ghosts. We have vampires. We have the beast within. Think of Hulk. Or maybe a serial killer. That could go. The thing with no name. That kind of thing. And then at the end, while the kids, we analyzed short stories. Of course, we watched movies. They had a podcast on serial killers, which was fascinating and disturbing, I'm not going to lie to you. And then they had to write their own horror story. Each student had, I believe it was ten pages, and wow! Just wow! Some of the things they came up with were just fascinating. In addition to addressing a certain trope, they also had to address a societal fear. Whether it be safety, technology, promiscuity. They had all of these wonderful topics that they all explored. If any of my readers like scary stories, definitely dive into that book, because wow! Those students blew my socks off. I mean, wow! Not just the gross factor. I'm not going to lie. There's a couple of gross factors. But the storytelling, I was really impressed with. Speaking of other storytelling, I did another anthology with my creative writing classes. This one is called, When Was This Due? I almost thought it was an ongoing joke, because all of my students hated me telling them that they had deadlines. While I understand I come from a different mindset, deadlines are deadlines, my friends. I'm excited about them, too. We have lots of poetry and some short stories and a wide arrangement of just techniques. We're not talking like Dr. Seuss poetry. We're talking like some really intense, amazing metaphors and whatnot. The last book that we just published, and I'm going to destroy the title, and I apologize for that, is Algo del Corazon. The whole entire book is in Spanish. No, I did not write it. Unfortunately, the only other language I know is sarcasm. It may be crazy. I'm pretty fluent in crazy. Anyway, this was a new project with Chandler Ochoa, and we had the Spanish 4 students write poetry. The whole entire book is in Spanish. What was kind of cool about it is that the students, when asked, because I'm like, oh, well, maybe we should put this also like an English translation on one page and then in Spanish on another, and they were like, no, not going to happen. Everything is always in English. Forget it. So I am super excited about this. I think it's going to be just amazing. I hope I can get more people that are bilingual that would like to write. I mean, I can help you write poetry. I don't necessarily know about the different words. I would say one of my favorite projects, several years ago, I had a foreign exchange student from Brazil. She, of course, was fluent in Portuguese, but she loved writing. It was funny. It was really funny because as her English comprehension grew, my understanding of how different languages work also grew. So we would essentially just get around sasaris.com, which someday I'm going to get a plug from them, and we worked at different words. What does gloomy mean in a different language? And does it translate? So I think this whole idea about writing in a different language and maybe even addressing the same issues, I think that's just maybe we'll learn about how limited language can be and then also how fluid and flexible it can be. So definitely check that out. I don't know. I'm really excited about it. So that's my very first thing. That's kind of why I did my little reset, because I just, I couldn't do it all. I couldn't do it all. And if I could just unplug my brain and just share it with somebody, oh my gosh, that would be amazing. So one of the things that I always do after school, and I've done this for a year. I didn't do it last year because it was weird. I was traveling abroad. I went to Ireland. I usually do, my kids call it the purge. No, I don't kill people. I kill dust bunnies. I rearrange things. I mean, I do a serious, serious deep clean. And my cleaning is kind of like, you know, yeah, I wipe away all the dust and I vacuum and I do all that. And I'm kind of like the crazy plant lady. So of course I have to plant my garden or redo my house plants, but then I also go through all of my belongings. And essentially what I do, and I've read it in a couple of books and I've read it on such and such, you know, there's so many different ways to organize. I, if it makes me happy or if it stirs a thought, then I keep it. I don't worry if I haven't tried on that sweater in eight years. I don't care if it makes me happy, I'm keeping it. Right? If it does not make me happy or if it does not stimulate some kind of an idea, then I get rid of it. So my advice for this reset for you is to go through your notes. I know, I'm sure people are writing things down in their phones, they take pictures. What I do, I actually have a notebook. I am a notebook junkie. You can ask any of my students. If I come across a phrase, a conversation, a situation, anything that just gathers my attention, that gets my attention, I write it down. It can be anything. And then what I end up doing, and this is what I suggest that you guys do, get your notes organized. Right? So I have just like, I have a sticky note. This is my process. It's not really the most efficient process, but I write down notes either in my notebook, it could be on the back of a receipt, it could be on a napkin, it could be on a sticky note, and then I then, finally, when I have some time, I sit down with all of these notes and whatnot, and I put them down in one location. Last year, I took one of my notebooks that I finished, and I ended up making a book called Binding Your Words. And all it is are just phrases. It's not really anything. Let's see. I'm trying to find some that you... that kind of caught my attention. And these could be positive, negative, otherwise, whatever. I'm just looking at some pages from this past year. Let's see. In complete darkness, there is no discrimination. Okay. Well, that's something. Or another one was... Hmm. Let me find a good one. This struck me as somewhat fundamentally stupid. I'm pretty sure I was watching Invader Zim when I was writing that. Sun smothers with attention. Or running a cult keeps me busy. So these are just phrases. There's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes I can tell you what I'm reading or what caught my attention. Anyway. Organize your notes. I'm sure everyone has a story. Maybe you can retell a story that you've heard. Maybe you have a favorite... I don't know. Maybe you have a story between your best friends. Or a personal joke. Or maybe you have a family story. So one of my family stories is every Christmas, one particular side of the family would pick the person. Somebody had to be it. And that person would get a gag gift every single Christmas. For example, mine... I'll put myself out there. My sophomore year of high school, I was pretty much grounded the whole year. I was a bad kid. Because I really wasn't. I mean, I grew up in a town that didn't have a stoplight. Right? So it's not like I'd get in tons of trouble. But I did not... I had issues with time, which is funny that I actually have students that don't like deadlines, so I think it was all coming back to get me, right? Anyway, I would be grounded, and then I could wager. I could make a bet with my parents, right? I could play my mother in tennis, which she happened to be my tennis coach. I could bet on a football game. Nebraska and Oklahoma was really big back in the day. I could play my stepdad in basketball. He was 6'7". You guys can see where it's going. So if I won, I was free. And if I lost, I was grounded a month. And that part sucked. Well, I learned I do not wager. I'm not going to go to Vegas. I'm not going to be counting cards. So I was grounded all the time. And that particular family story, that particular Christmas, I ended up giving prison clothing and a plastic ball and chain. That, I think, is hysterical. Maybe that is something that I would be organizing my notes. Maybe you could go through your pictures while you have to downsize your Google Drive and start thinking about the stories behind those actions, right? Sure, there's a bajillion selfies, but what was happening at that selfie? Was there certain music going on? Was there a certain time of your life that was going on? So that is definitely one thing that I would suggest when you're doing your summer reset. Purge! Get rid of all of the things that don't connect anymore, and then go through and kind of organize your thoughts. I think this would be great. Another one that I do, this is going to be kind of my final one, it's sort of short, is you need to be grounded. Now, for me, I'm actually very literal. I take my shoes off and I walk outside. I know, I sound like a weirdo. I love dirt. I love gardening. Believe it or not, my nickname growing up was Mud Puppy, because I never wore shoes and I was always in the mud, right? I really like gardening, and that actually kind of helps me calm and, you know, helps me go through ideas. And I kind of wanted to take this gardening analogy, or this gardening metaphor, is I want you to grow your dirt. I want you to compost your ideas. And you're like, what? Compost? Okay, so if you don't know what composting is, I take everything that is plant-based, right? I'm talking, like, banana peels, parts of bananas, plants, whatever. Any, you know, paper, anything that's biodegradable, and I put it out in a bucket. And then I'll put, then I, you know, rotate it, and then I put, like, grass clippings, and blah, blah, blah. And then eventually, all of that good earth, you're making good soil, can go back into your garden. So I'm really excited that I'm, you know, I'm growing peppers and tomatoes and lychee. I'm really, really stoked about lychee. But anyway, I get sidetracked. Composting your ideas. So ground yourself. Like, take a moment. It's okay to take a month off. I mean, I was still working, but it kind of also gave me some time to just ground myself and find what was important and what was connecting, right? So, grow your stories. Compost your ideas. And take a reset. It's okay to take some refreshment. Maybe get on a swing or a hammock. Maybe daydream a little while you're looking at clouds. And I think that we're going to have better stories. I think we're going to have that better foundation once we have good earth. So, here's my call to action to you. One, rest. It's kind of summer. It's after school. We can take some down time. You can kind of relax a little. You're not going to have Miss Faith yelling at you because you're missing a deadline. Blah, blah, blah. Right? You can relax a little bit. And then reset. Reset. Plant your feet and find your good stories. Grow your stories and compost your ideas. I think when you do that, I think our stories are going to be amazing. So, my name is Kinda Faith. I'm your host, your gracious host, and the executive director of Faith Publishing Inc. And I look forward to reading your work and seeing your stories. Until next time, take care. Stay with freshness. We'll see ya.