Ru Freeman

I’m over at the amazing Huffington Post Books blog, talking about the dos and do nots for writers while on Facebook. Why? Because a gazillion of us use Facebook and because nearly half that number use it as the sole means of promoting ourselves and our books. It felt right to get the ground rules right. Here’s an excerpt:

“‘Tis the season when people who have things to sell – be they Chop-Yer-Own-Fir Farms or Independent booksellers or, indeed, authors – have to give their wares an extra push. I know. But after the zillionth status update in the course of three months about one book or another streaming onto my screen via Facebook’s live news feed, I realized that we were all descending, en masse, into a vast swamp of self-promotion that is just not becoming of the writerly class. So, with the blessings of a few good people who happen to be authors, I have come up with ten-step pathway to grace for writers. Here goes:
…
Rule #4. Don’t join Facebook because you’ve heard it is a Good Way To Promote Your Book. It is a good way to promote your book, but it is primarily a – say it with me – Tool for Networking. That’s right. It’s a bar. It’s a soirée, it’s a gigantic party, it’s a flat out junket, but it is not Ebay, it is not Etsy, it is not LastMinuteDeals, it is notAmazon.com.”

You can read the full article over on the blog site. And do comment. The discussion over on Facebook is wonderful, and the personal emails and messages are even better, but it’s okay to let it all out.

I confess that I lean heavily on Facebook to stay in touch with my friends in the world of words, politics (words), and births, deaths and marriages (words, words, words). I’m an old-timer who joined Facebook way back in the year of the Lord 2004 or thereabouts when a ruckus erupted on campus over racist statements being bandied about on the site. It is only in the last few years though that I have become a tender of the flame. I avoid the quizzes; I haven’t taken one yet. I think. Quite recently, a good friend blinked out of Facebook because she needed to get back to writing. Last month, I caught Farhard Manjoor defending his piece against Facebook-holdouts in Slate on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. I have to admit that I laughed long and hard at the cranky anti-Facebookers that crowded the show, reminding me that the desire to be anti-cult can be just as cultish as the original cult. And that is said as someone who prides herself on being the front-line of defense for The Lord of the Rings against the tinny clamor of the Harry Potter chorus.

But the reason for this post is to share my discovery of an amazing poet, artist and human being named David Morley. Not being a poet myself, except in times of deep anguish when I am known to order unnecessarily melodramatic words into lines, claim that it is poetry and even mail it hither and yon only to cringe a day later, I had been oblivious of his existence or amazing contribution to literature until I ran across him on Facebook. I don’t even remember how it was that I found him. Perhaps it was a “friend suggestion,” or just by browsing through my friends’ lists of friends. I clicked on his link for the simple reason that he looked interesting. Yes, Virginia, your profile picture is important. David’s biography tells of eighteen published works including nine collections of poetry and of his life as “a critic, anthologist, editor and scientist of partly Romani extraction.” He teaches at the University of Warwick and this is his blog.

One of the most fascinating things that came to me through discovering Morley on Facebook, was a slow art poetry trail that he had constructed at Bolton Abbey, North Yorkshire. The poems are written into the natural materials and are designed to remain there until they disappear. You can watch the introduction by Morley and follow the trail here.

The word-iteration of sand mandalas. The fact that my first novel contained an enormous amount of research into Romani rituals. David Morley out of the ether. Life is good. Facebook on, my friends, even with the new and not-improved version of the beast, it remains a beautiful thing.