Life List Inspiration from Go Mighty

Life List Inspiration from Go Mighty

Holy, holy, a lot is happening on Go Mighty this week.

Natalie Holbrook‘s #MightyLove project is about small acts of kindness online. Go Mighty’s plan was to donate $500 to a battered women’s shelter in NYC once we got to 500 tweets/instagrams tagged #mightylove. Which happened in a couple of hours. What the what? You guys are the best. The project is still going strong until April 12, so throw a compliment someone’s way. Meanwhile, Natalie is posting her favorite compliments on Go Mighty, so go see if you’re on her list.

My Go Mighty Skillshare class on Life Lists starts Monday, and one participant will receive a $1,000 goal grant from Go Mighty. Last month’s grant went to Emrys Kim, who’s planning a trip to South Korea to take spoken histories of women who were coerced into brothels during the Japanese occupation. Sign up for the class and let us know your plans.

We’re in our third week of the #ThankAWriter project with Nathan Bransford. Nathan’s letter this week was to the author and teacher that encouraged him to write his first novel. You should read it. Moving stuff.

I’ve enjoyed reading about which writers inspire you all and why. Here are a few letters written by Go Mighty members this week: To Kazuo Ishiguro, To Sharon G. Flake, To Lois Lowry, To Kay Ryan, To Martin Waddell,  To Pam Houston, To Mo Willems.

So much good stuff, right? Keep it up, team. We are a snowball rolling downhill.

Photo credit: Sara Lucero

Thank a Writer Project: Where to Send an Author Thank You Letter

We’re in the third week of our Go Mighty Thank a Writer Project, and lots of you have asked where to send your notes when you don’t have an address. I asked Nathan, who knows this sort of thing. He says to look up the publisher’s address in the book and then send it to:

Author Name
c/o Publisher Name, Author Mail

So this note I’m sending this week is addressed like this:

Ms. Judith Martin
c/o Crown Publisher’s Inc., Author Mail
201 East 50th St.
New York, NY 10022

To read my note to Miss Manners and the rest of my notes, head over to my Life List on Go Mighty. And remember to tag your notes #ThankAWriter. Every tagged note is an entry to win the first six editions in the gorgeous Penguin Classics Drop Cap series:

Come here, you beautiful books, let’s cuddle.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

This is the first thing I’ve read by John Green, and it’s good. Green is clever and talented — he certainly made me laugh. Still, I found this a frustrating read because it had the potential to be great. I still recommend it, but if you’re someone who notices when the shiny bits don’t match the rest of the work, this might bug you a little. That said, on to the shiny bits, of which there were plenty.

The best parts of The Fault in Our Stars:

I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.

“Yeah, hurdlers. I don’t know why. I started thinking about them running their hurdle races, and jumping over these totally arbitrary objects that had been set in their path. And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.

“Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than any sighted person ever could.”

The absolute sterility of the place made me nostalgic for the happy-kid bullshit at Children’s. Memorial was so functional. It was a storage facility. A prematorium.

Vocabulary

hamartia – fatal flaw
toroidal – doughnut shaped
numinous – filled with a sense of the presence of divinity

Happiness Versus Meaning

When I was in high school, I read Vicktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, presumably because it was on a book list. I don’t remember specifics, but his name has been coming up for me as I think about what I want to say in this Skillshare class next week.

If you’re not familiar with Frankl’s work, he was a psychotherapist who practiced as an inmate at Auschwitz. He found that people were able to survive best when they felt they had purpose.

In pursuing happiness, it’s easy to overlook the pursuit of meaning. So I ordered another copy of the book, and I’m thinking more about responsibility as I look over my Life List in preparation for this class. There’s still space, if you’d like to join in.

In the meantime, is this something you think about too? Do you feel like you’ve found your “thing?”