Roz Warren Writes for Everyone from the New York Times to the Funny Times

Librarian/author Roz Warren

As I've indicated many times, Medium has been a great place to meet a lot of interesting people. It's a community of writers and readers, with a full spectrum of interests on every facet of life and a range of experience from beginners to lifetime professionals.

In some ways Medium is similar to other social media platforms. For example, you can choose to "follow" people, and they frequently follow back in turn. And since Medium was founded by Ev Williams, who co-created Blogger and later Twitter, it has gives member writers a chance to write self-descriptions that succinctly say who they are. I very much liked Roz Warren's slogan, which got me into reading one of her stories, and then another.

She's got a bright wit, and knows how to tell a story.

EN: Can you briefly describe your path as a writer?

Roz Warren: Like a lot of writers, I began writing as soon as I could hold a pencil and never stopped. I began publishing short fiction in my 20s, in magazines from Beatniks from Space to Seventeen Magazine. These days, I write essays and humor, for everybody from the Funny Times to the New York Times.

And, of course, I write on Medium.

EN: What kind of law did you practice and was there a trigger incident that prompted you to leave that behind to become a librarian?

RW: I was a bankruptcy attorney. Twenty-two years ago, I impulsively took a job at my local public library when I realized that having fun was more important to me than having money. I have no regrets.

EN: Do you have an especially funny library story you can share here?

RW: Here's the first funny story I ever wrote about library work. It's included in Our Bodies, Our Shelves, my collection of library humor.
(EdNote: Go read A Nun Walks Into A Library...)

EN: Were you a class clown? Would it surprise your Detroit classmates to see you getting published in Reader’s Digest and the New York Times?

RW: I was never a class clown. I was not a goofy, attention-grabbing little girl. Instead, I was the kid in glasses with her nose in a book at all times. So I doubt anyone was surprised when I became a writer. But they may not have expected that I'd be a humor writer.

EN: Do you have a philosophy or process about humor writing?

RW: I don't know why, but I've always cared a lot more about funny stuff than other people seemed to. I like to laugh. I read a lot of humor and watch a lot of comedy, and when I write, I "write funny." That's just my voice and it always has been.

EN: What is it that makes written humor effective?

Roz loves libraries and being a grandma.

RW: For written humor to be effective, it has to surprise the reader. In a good way.

EN: In the same vein, have you ever done stand-up? You strike me as outgoing. How is stand-up comedy different from humor writing?

RW: I'm not at all outgoing. I think of myself as a friendly introvert. Library work is perfect for me because I love interacting with people, but one at a time. And in a situation that has some structure.

I've never wanted to do stand-up. Becoming a successful stand-up means hanging out in bars and clubs with other comics till 2 in the morning. It also means hitting the road to hone your act.

I want to write in my home office alone in my pajamas and be in my own bed every night by 10. That, to me, is a perfect life.

I once appeared on the Today Show. My Today Show goal was to not die of fright on live TV in front of 5 million people. I'm happy to say that I met that goal. And while I'm glad I met the challenge of entertaining millions of people on live television, that one taste of fame didn't make me eager to repeat that kind of live, high-pressure tightrope walk.
(EdNote: Here's where you can read Roz's An Introvert on the Today Show.)

EN: Your Leonard Cohen story was a fun read. Did you ever get a chance to see him again?

RW: I'm glad you enjoyed it! It's so great when your heroes turn out to be as wonderful as you'd hoped they'd be.

My editor at the Times required that Cohen sign off on the accuracy of the essay before it was published, which he did, through his manager, so I know that Cohen read it. But I never saw him again after the night I wrote about.

But that's okay. I got one more night with Leonard Cohen than most fans got.

EN: Any tips here on how to get bylines in Reader’s Digest or the NYTimes?

RW: In both cases, I didn't submit work. Instead, editors read my work online and got in touch with me. Reader's Digest asked if they could reprint one of my humor pieces. And an editor at the Times recruited me to write for "Booming," their (at the time) brand new blog for Baby Boomers.

I wrote about that experience here: Why Every Essay You Write Should Be the Best Essay You Can Write.

The takeaway? Make sure that everything you write on Medium is as good as it can possibly be before you publish it. Because you never know if an editor for Reader's Digest or the New York Times (or a Today Show producer) will end up reading it.

EN: Thanks, Roz. Great fun, and useful info for writers as well.

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Related Links 
OUR BODIES, OUR SHELVES: A COLLECTION OF LIBRARY HUMOR 
JUST ANOTHER DAY AT YOUR LOCAL PUBLIC LIBRARY
You can also read more of her work here: https://muckrack.com/roz-warren
What’s In A Name? A Batch of People With Interesting Medium Profiles
Roz Warren on Medium

Authenticity: Who Are You, Really?

“How slow and slow and slow it goes to mend the tear the always shows…” ~Neil Young

I woke this morning with a theory about the people who write books about Bob Dylan. Upon waking I riffed through the bibliography sections of Robert Shelton's No Direction Home (current bedtime reading) and Lee Marshall's book that I finished last week. One of the titles that caught my attention in Marshall's bibliography was a book by David Boyle titled Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life. It brought to mind book concept I once outlined 15 years ago titled Boomer, Do You Know Who You Are?

My book for the baby boom generation was intended to be an antidote to some of the maladies friends of mine and I had noticed in our peers (and ourselves): a feeling of superficiality and fakiness, of having to play games; creeping deadness... lack of enthusiasm for life, work, etc.; aimlessness, lack of direction; weakness, helplessness to change situations, powerlessness; aware that we are not changing the world, our lack of social impact.

In response to these I'd hoped to strike a chord and re-affirm the ideals our generation once professed way back when: Authenticiy, Passion (Motivation, Enthusiasm), Purposefulness, Personal Power, Social Consciousness.

Boyle's book focuses only on the first of these, in a comprehensive manner that dissects everything. What's amusing to me is the opening line of the book's overview at Amazon.com:

"David Boyle guides us through the next big thing in Western living -- the determined rejection of the fake, the virtual, the spun and the mass-produced, in the search for authenticity."  

To call "Authenticity" the "next big thing" is to have forgotten what the Sixties was all about. Young people were realizing that their perceptions about how things are was being crafted. Have we come full circle?

As far as being authentic ourselves -- authentic to who we really are -- it's not as easy as it appears. Two decades ago I participated in a Meyers-Briggs personality workshop at a company where I formerly worked and learned a lot about how differently we are wired in many fundamental ways. As anyone who knows me knows, I am an extrovert, but in one exercise where I was to solve a problem with four other extroverts I became more introverted. Being thus out of sync with myself made me uncomfortable. What it also showed me is that who we are is often determined by context.

Since who and what we are seems to be in flux and is to some extent defined by our relationships, this may be why our lives sometimes feel like a quest to find relationships that bring out the best in us. Not every relationship or set of circumstances does this.

If we step back to the big picture, there's a historical context, a genealogical context and a global context worth noting... and then there's DNA and the imago dei. That's a whole 'nuther story.

I'm still looking forward to reading Boyle's book.

Our American Narcissism

About ten years ago I wanted to write an article or book directed toward Baby Boomers with the pithy (I believed at the time) title, Boomer: Do You Know Who You Are? The main idea of the piece was to address a number of the life issues I believed boomers were dealing with including, feelings of superficiality and fakiness, having to play games; creeping deadness, lack of enthusiasm for life, work, etc.; aimlessness, lack of direction; weakness, helplessness to change situation, powerlessness; growing cynicism due to awareness that we are not changing the world, our lack of social impact.

The chief aim was to remind fellow Boomers of our tattered ideals and help them become once more the authentic, passionate, motivated, enthusiastic, purposeful, powerful, socially conscious people they were meant to be. In other words, "remember your roots and draw strength from who you are."

One of the major problems with this project, however, is that it seems to simultaneously perpetuate one of the great problems of this generation: our pervasive American Narcissism. The very act of writing such a book feels, at least for the moment, like a doomed building on a baseless foundation. I'll try to touch the core of that thought via this route.

When a Major League baseball team wins the World Series, we love calling it the World championship, even though it is only the U.S. and two Canadian cities involved. How different this is from the World Cup in soccer, which is truly a global competition.

Is our Hollywood celebrity worship something that could have originated elsewhere? I actually do not know the extent to which many of our practices extend beyond our borders. Do our celebrities really hate the intrusive behavior of the papparazzi, or do they actually feel injured if the papparazzi fail to show up when they are out and about? How did we get so grandiose about our heroes?

We call our parents' generation the "greatest generation" but we have always acted as if everything was, is and will be all about us.

I was talking with someone last week who had been to China on a business trip. He went there with the idea in his head that he was going to see exploited masses of people in a backward country making things with their hands. He did not expect to see factories with modern robotics. Or cities with five million people that he never heard of because they were the smaller cities there. He was especially struck by the quantity of construction cranes that were constructing ever more buildings to keep pace with the economic boom China has been experiencing as it rushes forward into the future.

What does it mean to be a Boomer actually? The term is itself an American term. Just like Gen X, which our media used to describe our following American generation. We have a new wave of young people whom journalists compete to define, but it is only American young people they are defining because at the end of the story it's like, "Oh, you mean the Gen Xers in other parts of the world, like Italy and Bulgaria and Brazil and Zimbabwe aren't like our Gen Xers?" As if such things could be remotely possible with their various contexts and experiences so different from our own.

In short, the whole Boomer construct is a Pop Culture construct, a product of our tendency toward superficial Pop world views. Isn't it? So how can I write a "serious" book about Boomers, for Boomers, and market it through the very Pop channels that I am deriding?

I dunno. Maybe I'm making too much of this today. But to put things in perspective, what will people be saying about Boomers a thousand years from now? "What were Boomers?" For all I know the international trade language will be Chinese and their historians will be trying to figure out why English used to be the most global language at the beginning of the third millennium. What do you think?

The Evolution of Made in Japan: From Inferior Quality to Tokyo Wealth

A few weeks ago I received an interesting email from my son with links to a YouTube video by a woman named Arundhati Roy, an Indian writer and activist whose book The God Of Small Things obtained for her international attention and awards. I'd never heard of Ms. Roy, so I was interested in hearing some of what she had to say.

I watched the video, and another, and was so impressed I bought the book. Well, impressed enough to want a copy of something she'd written so I could see more vividly where she was coming from. Her thought provoking ideas were resonating with a part of me, and evidently with others as well.

The world has changed, is changing and will continue to do so. Boomers experienced this first hand as we were growing up. There was a time when goods that had the words MADE IN JAPAN printed on them were of a fairly inferior quality. Yet when you watch a film like Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation starring Bill Murray, you can be sure that all that Tokyo wealth was not created on the backs of laborers who manufactured junk.

International trade has created wealth abroad, and made U.S. dependence on foreign sources of goods an imperative. We say we dislike what the big box retailers are doing in terms of importing foreign goods, yet we also dislike high prices. Hence on his Infidels album Dylan sings:

Well, my shoes, they come from Singapore

My flashlight's from Taiwan

My tablecloth's from Malaysia

My belt buckle's from the Amazon

You know, this shirt I wear comes from the Philippines

And the car I drive is a Chevrolet

It was put together down in Argentina

By a guy making thirty cents a day.

~Union Sundown, Bob Dylan

This international trade of goods has been moving wealth around the world for a very long time. How did England gain its great wealth in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire? (Rhetorical)

But today, the changes coming may even be more significant as we see the Internet transferring ideas around the world, with unheard of speed. American citizens have been isolated by geography from most of the world's distress. But today, with the Internet, it's all out there, within view, if you wish to look and listen. These are, therefore, amazing times. Sensitive, thoughtful people have finally found a mechanism for being heard. Sensitive, thoughtful Americans are beginning to hear voices they had been shielded from by those who edit the evening news and those who feed us the pictures on our glass onions and flat panel screens.

On this topic there is much more to say.... but we'll get to that another day.

The Wake-Up Call

At one time I wanted to write to Baby Boomers who have not yet completely yielded to self-imprisonment. When I think back, I realize that you don't have to be a Boomer to experience these warning signals.

• Feeling of superficiality and fakiness, having to play games.
• Creeping deadness... lack of enthusiasm for life, work, etc
• Aimlessness, lack of direction
• Weakness, helplessness to change situation, powerlessness
• Aware that you are not changing the world.... lack of social impact

If you recognize any of these symptoms in yourself, it’s time to wake up. Remember who you were meant to be.

AUTHENTIC
PASSIONATE • MOTIVATED • ENTHUSIASTIC
PURPOSEFUL
POWERFUL
SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS

Remember your roots! Draw strength from who you are.... Don't give in to the siren song of the cynics. Wake up! This is your life. It is not a dream. Open your eyes.