Diamond in the Basalt

You are specially invited to:

Design by Jacqui for Slide Sideways

Ladies Who Lunch July

A monthly gathering of young women friends at:

One World Cafe

“your local and organic community kitchen”

1804 E. Sprague Ave. Saturday, July 11th, 11:30-1:30pm

Come to meet new creative, intelligent, charming, and exciting young women in Spokane. We will eat fantastic food and have an opportunity to check in and share our plans for future events.

At the June brunch we had ~15 gals in attendance, and many more who were over at the Pride Fest in Riverfront Park. About a third were first-timers, so don’t be shy! Come on out and join us. It’s easy to lead a fulfilling urban social life in Spokane’s summer season. We’ll help you along the way.

*Guys and kids are welcome. Lunch is by donation with cash or check only. There is no register so be prepared to make change. For questions or comments please call (509) 939-0015 or email shrinkingvioletsociety [at] gmail [dot] com for more information.

The results are in from our “Call for Concepts” logo design contest. Three bold members found the time to create and submit 3-4 designs each and now we are going to democratically vote for the winner.

To cast your vote, simply select your choice below and click the “vote” button, or complete the online survey here. All votes are due by Friday, July 3rd, 2009 before midnight.

Contestants were asked to consider printability and reproducibility in their designs, and voters are asked to consider the same.

The artist with the winning design will receive a certificate for a one hour massage by Violet’s member Mariah Neeson, compliments of our extra event revenue from the clothing exchange. Second and third place winners will receive meal tickets to One World Cafe donated through the volunteer equity of Violet’s member Monique Kovalenko.

Thanks also goes to Keely Honeywell for helping to organize this activity.

We at the Spokane Shrinking Violets are dedicated to treating our creatives well, and as you can see, what goes around comes around!

Just like our favorite cafe believes in zero food waste, we believe in “zero design waste.” Non-winning designs will be made into buttons, stickers, T-shirts and other DIY style stuff over time. Meanwhile, let us know what you think about these logos!

Almost two years ago a trio of gals living on the lower South Hill decided to throw a party. Now this wasn’t going to be just any party, they wanted to go the extra mile and do something special. They had done a pot luck for young people in the neighborhood, had hosted a taco bar and craft parties, put on a spaghetti feed and celebrated a couple of birthdays. This time they had clothes on the brain, and building a stronger social women’s community in Spokane.

The result? Over 40 lovely ladies showed up to rake through each others’ stuff and find fun new things to wear. All for the unbeatable price of FREE!

Fast-forward two years and you find yourself in a different  Spokane. New albums have been released, restaurants have opened, and the city has spawned a new network of creative lady friends looking to lift each other up and help make a positive impact – the Shrinking Violets!

Please join us in making a new tradition at the first annual  Shrinking Violets Clothing Swap:

Invitation design by Kim Wescott

At the last meeting, the coordinators and attendees decided to change the scheduling of the book club meetings. Instead of reading one book every six weeks (with two meetings), we have decided that every third Sunday of every month we will read a new book. That way, everyone can plan their weekends accordingly and be prepared to discuss the book in its entirety.

July’s book is:

Bastard Out of Carolina

by Dorothy Allison

“Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family – rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other’s trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Observing everything with the mercilessly keen eye of a child, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney. Her stepfather, Daddy Glen, calls Bone ‘cold as hell, mean as a snake, and twice as twisty, yet Anney needs Glen. At first gentle with Bone, Daddy Glen becomes steadily colder and more furious-until their final, harrowing encounter, from which there can be no turning back.”

Meeting Date: Sunday, July 19, 2009

Time: 1-3 pm

Location: Monique’s House

Please email one of us for address, directions or more details:

Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monique – moneeeq [at] gmail [dot] com

Also, we will be sure to keep everyone posted about the next 3 books, and vote at each meeting for the 4th book. As of now, here is the lineup…

August 16:

Miss Harper Can Do It

Jane Berentson (cousin of SVS local celebrity Kaylee Cole)

September 20:

Jewel of Medina

Sherry Jones

October 18:

Prisoner of Tehran

Marina Nemat

You are specially invited to…

A monthly gathering of young women friends at:

One World Cafe

‘your local and organic community kitchen’

1804 E. Sprague Ave. Saturday, June 13th, 11:30-1:30pm

Come to meet new creative, intelligent, charming, and exciting young women in Spokane. We will eat some fantastic food and have an opportunity to check in and share our ideas and plans for future Shrinking Violet events.

*Guys and kids are welcome. Lunch is by donation with cash or check only. There is no register so be prepared to make change. For questions or comments please call (509) 939-0015 or email shrinkingvioletsociety [at] gmail [dot] com for more information.

You may have heard of a little band from Bellingham called Death Cab for Cutie. They have these really catchy lyrics and just about every girl between the ages of 12 and 17 is in love with their front man, Ben Gibbard. Death Cab is currently on tour and they stopped in Spokane on April 24th. To be honest, I was more excited about the opening bands for this show than I was to see Death Cab.

Ra Ra Riot, from Syracuse, NY opened the night with a sound that makes me think of Vampire Weekend but with the addition of a cello and violin. I immediately fell in love with their energy and sound. (I’m also a sucker for string instruments.) Unfortunately, no one seemed to be attending to the lights and soundboard. Throughout their entire set, the lights were kept at a just-too-bright level and the vocals were drowned out by the guitar and constant chatter of concert-goers waiting to be impressed.

This brings up two issues:

1. At the majority of local shows I have been to the past few years, people tend to just stand around with arms crossed as if waiting to be impressed while the musicians onstage sing/play their hearts out. What gives? Are we too cool to enjoy the music? There have been a couple of exceptions to this. One that really stands out was a show at Caterina earlier this year with Please Draw in Me. When those guys start playing, I don’t think anyone can resist the urge to dance!
2. Poor lighting and sound are not only an insult to the musicians, but also the fans who shell-out their hard earned money to see and hear a good show. It’s venues like Caterina with their painstaking attention to sound and lighting that keep Spokane’s music scene thriving!

Cold War Kids, from Long Beach, CA took the stage next with a great light show and an energy that pulsed through the stadium and shocked everyone out of their cooler than thou trance. Bodies started moving in time to the music and elbows met stomachs as people forgot themselves and finally gave in to the music. The light and sound was much improved for CWK and their set proved to be a great warm-up for the headliner, Death Cab.

As I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t too excited about Death Cab. I enjoy their music and find myself singing along with the catchy lyrics, but they just don’t get my adrenaline flowing. Maybe it’s because they’re over-played. Maybe it’s because their sound is now oh so familiar. Whatever the case may be, when you’re on the floor with thousands of other bodies around you and everyone starts singing along to a song like The Sound of Settling, it’s hard not to get swept into it all.

There is something about the experience of being one of the thousands of voices joined together in song that leaves me with a feeling of pure joy. If ever there was a thing to bring people together, it is music. I know I’m not the first person to realize this and many have capitalized on it. In fact, the experience reminded me a lot of my time attending a certain Northside Christian church as a teenager.

I wanted to share with you all my secret fantasy. I was thinking about where I work (Community-Minded Enterprises), the Shrinking Violets, and my grad school program (at EWU), and how my life is compartmentalized with some overlaps. CME is working on Sustainable September, a month of events moving our community closer to sustainable living and working. Grad students love public readings. Then everything meshed together for a minute, and I had this idea—why not have a public reading in September that will showcase creative writing done by community members, sharing thoughts about sustainability!

I discussed the idea with the writers who showed up to the workshop last week, and they thought it was a great idea. So I’m trying to put it all together now. I would like to share with you the poem and the essay we discussed in the last meeting and the prompts that we used, in case any Violets couldn’t make it to workshop, wanted to write, and would like to work on something that I could help revise at a future meeting. Then maybe I could encourage you to read it out loud to your friends, because I know that

1. the piece will be awesome, and
2. everyone will be supportive

Fleshing Out Abstractions

Poetry/Fiction Prompt:
Based on T.R. Hummer’s “Apocatastasis Foretold in the Shape of a Canvas of Smoke” (This is an embedded book, so I recommend typing “Apocatastasis” in the search pages function.)

Take an abstract noun and work on concrete, sensory images that help to define it. For all of the prompts, I recommended nouns such as sustainability, community, and green.

Take a complex, rich (in meanings) abstract noun and couple it to a closely observed narrative so that the meaning of the abstract noun is revealed or illustrated or suggested by the details of the narrative.

Nonfiction Prompt:

Here is a link to Michael Pollan’s “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”

You are probably an expert on something that everyone else thinks that they know. You know something more about the topic, though. Write a redefinition essay that will explain

1. the general understanding of the thing, and
2. what you think it is really all about.

Happy writing!

You are specially invited to…

A monthly gathering of young women friends at:

One World Cafe

‘your local and organic community kitchen’

1804 E. Sprague Ave. Saturday, May 9th, 11:30-1:30pm

Come to meet new creative, intelligent, charming, and exciting young women in Spokane. We will eat some fantastic food and have an opportunity to check in and share our ideas and plans for future Shrinking Violet events.

*Guys and kids are welcome. Lunch is by donation with cash or check only. There is no register so be prepared to make change. For questions or comments please call (509) 939-0015 or email shrinkingviolets [at] gmail [dot] com for more information.

I’ve been struggling a bit with how to describe this exciting thing we have going on with the Shrinking Violet Society. It’s not a “club” per se, and it seems much more significant than yet another “social network”. The term “micro-community” isn’t commonly understood, and so I’m very curious to learn about how other people are describing our purpose and our mission.

Recently I finished reading “Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time” by Margaret J. Wheatley. Pages 174-177 provided some interesting answers.

What do you think about the following in terms of your hopes and desires for the Shrinking Violets? What do you believe we have the potential to become?

[NOTE: I have added links to various parts of this passage to point our how I think it is directly relevant to what we are doing here in Spokane. Chances are you will see your own parallels and examples.]

Name the Community

Pioneering leaders act in isolation, unaware that they are part of a broader community. They act on intuition and experience, struggling not to revert to the practices of the past. They feel alone and strange, often criticized, even ridiculed, by their community. For believing that they can lead in new ways, solve entrenched problems, and create sustainable progress, they often get labeled negatively as idealists, dreamers, innocents.

Isolation dissolves when they learn that they are part of a community, that there are many more like them. They gain confidence and courage. They find new energy to stay in the challenges and struggles of pioneering.

The community they belong to is a community of practice, not of place, because it is formed among people who act from the same values and visions, and who are doing similar work. They may be a community of people working in education, or organic farming, or local government. They share the same type of work, yet their practices are varied and unique, specific to the needs of their local culture. In this way the community is very diverse in its expression, and very united in its purpose.

Connect the Community

Once the community has been named, it is important that people find the means to connect with one another and to keep those connections strong and present. We live in a time when connecting across distance and difference has become much easier. Technology can facilitate working as as community through dedicated websites, online conferences, and listserves. But technology is only a supplement to the need to be together in the same physical space from time to time. There is no substitute for being together, so periodic gatherings of the community, visits to each other’s towns and worksites, and any other means to meet face-to-face are essential. The stronger the connections, the more support and new knowledge will be born from those connections.

Nourish the Community

Communities of practice need to be nourished with many different resources. They require ideas, methods, mentors, processes, information, technology, equipment, money. Each of these is important, but perhaps the greatest need is that of knowledge – knowing what techniques and processes work well. For example, a leader may be conducting a community development process, yet know nothing of the means to engage the whole community, or new processes for valuing a community’s assets. Without this knowledge, people either reinvent the wheel or use whatever process they know, even inappropriate or substandard ones.

Illuminate the Community

There is a critical need to tell the stories of these pioneering leaders-in-community, to get public attention for their efforts. Remember how difficult it is for any of us to see a new paradigm, even when it’s right under our noses. People, if they do take notice, are most likely to see these new pioneers as inspiring but temporary deviations from the norm. It takes time, attention, and a consistent media focus for people to see them for what they are, examples of what’s possible, of what our new world could look like. We need to hear their stories, celebrate their successes, and continue to support them as our beacons to the future.

How Communities of Practice Differ from Networks

We live in a time when coalitions, alliances, and networks are growing. People have created many networks and, now, networks of networks. These networks are essential for successful change – they are the first step in people finding like-minded others. People usually network together for personal, even instrumental reasons. They move in and out of them based on how well they serve their own work. The formation of a network is an important preliminary gathering step.

Communities of practice are the next step, and they are different in significant ways. They are communities, which means that people make a commitment to be available to each other, to offer support to share learning, to consciously develop new knowledge. They are there not only for their own needs, but for the needs of others. These communities succeed best when they start with some type of community formation process. People need to clarify their personal intent and commitment and, as a group, the need to agree on how they will work together, how they will support one another, and what their work will be.

The speed with which people learn and grow in a community of practice is essential. Good ideas move rapidly among members, and from local to global. This new knowledge and wisdom are implemented quickly from exchanges among practitioners. The speed at which knowledge development and exchange happens is crucial, because the world needs this knowledge and wisdom NOW. Therefore, sponsoring communities of practice among pioneering leaders is a deliberate strategy to speed up the the emergence of new leadership practices everywhere, to give the world the leadership it needs at this time.

The fourth book for our book group has been chosen:

Everything is Illuminated

by Jonathan Safran Foer

“With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man — also named Jonathan Safran Foer — sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.”

Feel free to discuss anything you would like about this book in the comments: questions, concerns, conflicts, confusions, etc. Please keep in mind that some of us may not have finished the book, so if your comment gives away some key plot detail, please start with WARNING: SPOILERS at the top.

If you would like to discuss Everything is Illuminated in person, please join us for our group meeting on:

May 17th (Sunday) from 1 – 3 pm

at Coffee Social

113 W Indiana Ave
Spokane, WA 99205
(509) 327-7127

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to email one of the book group coordinators:

Becky – beckyhuss [at] gmail [dot] com

Hilary – hilwhitt [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monique – moneeeq [at] gmail [dot] com