New Online Class: Freelancing 101

Posted in Teaching, Writing on December 26, 2012 by frankbures

JanFeb2013_Loft_Classes_Events-WEB2There are said to be some 42 million freelance workers in the US right now–fully 1/3 of the US workforce.  Many of them, presumably, are winging it. I know this because once I was one of them. But over the last two decades, I’ve learned many useful things and made lots of mistakes from which you can now benefit in a new online class I’ll be teaching through The Loft in February.  Here’s the gist:

Every writer dreams of quitting his or her day job and living the freelance life. No cubicles. No timecards. No boss. But these days, freelancing may be as much necessity as luxury, and in both cases the learning curve can been steep. Frank Bures has been freelancing full time for almost a decade, and part time for nearly two. He has put together this class based on hard-won wisdom. In it, we will look at everything from how to survive in an ever-shifting media market place, to current market rates, to how to run a business, to the fundamentals of selling and writing stories to a wide variety of publishers.”

Read the rest, or register here. Limited to 16 students.

Why Being Bicultural is Better

Posted in Clips, Culture, Science, Travel on December 14, 2012 by frankbures

mcitalyYears ago, I was eating at McDonald’s in the Florence, Italy train station when I spotted three tall men in American football jerseys. I was glad to see some compatriots, so I went over and struck up a conversation. It turned out that the Americans were playing for a league that was trying to spread the sport in Europe, apparently without much success. We chatted for a while, and one of them mentioned that his contract was almost up.

“Man, I can’t wait to get out of here,” he said, “and get back to the real world.”

I knew exactly what he meant. I’d also experienced the feeling that in this new country, nothing made sense, no rules were obeyed, and the basic logic of the universe didn’t apply. But then I’d started speaking the language, understanding the logic, and moving into a space where the Italian world felt more real to me than the American one I’d left behind.

I recalled the football player’s remark recently, when I heard about some new research. It seems that living abroad is not simply a matter of relocation. It’s a matter of mindset. And what you get out of it depends more on what goes on in your head than on your dates of arrival and departure.

Read the rest here.

Dispatch from Djibouti

Posted in Africa, Clips, Science, Travel on December 11, 2012 by frankbures

water-500x393From my story about Djibouti, a bridge, and why we wander in the new Nowhere Magazine:

Standing on the edge of the Red Sea 60,000 years ago, the first people looked across the water, saw mountains rising above the horizon, and decided to go there. No one knows how they crossed the water, but they did.  Somehow, this small band of a few as 150 individuals made their way from Africa to Arabia—from what is now the tiny country of the Djibouti on one side, to the troubled nation of Yemen on the other. After that, they kept going. They followed the shorelines. They went inland. They scaled mountains and crossed plains.  They spread out into the world until they filled every corner of it.

They, of course, were us.

148731_10151336792081796_130483487_nBab al Mandeb is thought to be the place they crossed.  It is the “Gate of Tears,” where the Red Sea narrows and the powerful ocean currents have sunk countless ships over the ages.  But back when those first people crossed the oceans would have been lower, so instead of seventeen miles of water there would have been just seven, with islands along the way. Today the islands are submerged and the ends of the straight reach out to each other like some continental version of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Man” on the Sistine Chapel.

When I first read about this, I looked up the place on a map.  The language those people spoke, they clothes they wore, the thoughts they had—those are all gone forever.  But the place is still there, and I knew I wanted to go there someday. I wanted to stand where it all began…

Read the rest here.

 

Remembering Blue Marble

Posted in Clips, Science, Travel on December 7, 2012 by frankbures

bluemarble-575Forty years ago today, on Dec. 7, 1972, three young men were on their way to the moon, racing away from the Earth at 25,000 miles per hour. Some ways out (about 28,000 miles), their ship passed a narrow tunnel of light, directly between the Earth and the sun. In that moment, they looked out the window and saw the Earth as almost no one had ever seen it: a giant, full, beautiful circle. The sands of the Sahara were in full sunlight. The snows of Antarctica shone bright white. The ocean resonated a deep blue hue.

At that point, one member of the Apollo 17 crew picked up a specially made Hasselblad camera and took several photos. No one knows who did this, because all three astronauts recalled taking the photo. Whomever did, it was a stunning, rare shot. You could see nearly all of Africa – the cradle of humanity – as well as the island of Madagascar, the Arabian peninsula and the clouds swirling over the ocean.

The photo would eventually become known as the “Blue Marble,” and it would become one of the most enduring pictures of all time. In fact, that photo probably changed the way we viewed our place in the cosmos more than any other.

Read the rest here.

Minnesota Ice

Posted in America, Clips on October 11, 2012 by frankbures

…In his clas­sic travel book Blue High­ways: A Jour­ney Into Amer­ica, William Least Heat Moon noted some­thing sim­i­lar after trav­el­ing through the area in the late 1970s. “When I walked the North towns,” he wrote, “peo­ple, won­der­ing who the out­sider was, would look at me; but as soon as I nod­ded, they looked down, up, left, right, or turned around as if sum­moned by an invis­i­ble caller.… The effect on me was that I felt more alone than I ever had in the desert. I wished for the South where any topic is worth at least a brief exchange. And so I went across the cen­tral North, see­ing many peo­ple, but not often learn­ing where our lives crossed com­mon ground.”

Recently, I was talk­ing to a friend from Ten­nessee. I asked him, if you walked into a bar full of strangers down there, would it be easy to find some­one to talk to? He seemed to think it was a silly ques­tion and said, “Of course!” Another friend, from Ore­gon, told me about a con­ver­sa­tion he struck up with a stranger in a bar—who turned out to be from Texas. “Yep,” the Texan said, “Min­nesotans are the nicest peo­ple in the world. They’ll give you direc­tions any­where except their house.”

This Min­nesota Ice is the flip side to Min­nesota Nice. When pho­tog­ra­pher Alec Soth was asked for two words to describe Min­nesotans, the ones he chose seemed almost to be oppo­sites: friendly and remote.

Read the rest here.

Theater of Public Policy: The Fall of the Creative Class

Posted in America, Events on October 1, 2012 by frankbures

Do you like improv? Do you like public policy? The two are now blissfully wed at the Theater of Public Policy. This Thursday I’ll be on stage talking about–what else?–The Fall of the Creative Class. Only $5!   “Frank Bures, Literary Editor for Thirty Two Magazine  joins us this Thursday to talk about Richard Florida’s Creative Class Theory and why it’s not what it claims to be. The show is at Huge Theater and starts at 7pm.”  More details here.

Bringing the Outdoor Indoors

Posted in Clips on October 1, 2012 by frankbures

A new slideshow I put together on indoor adventures:

Once upon a time, doing extreme outdoor sports meant traveling far away from city life. There were no vending machines. When night came, it got dark. The terrain was laid out without a floor plan. There was something called “weather,” and the seasons determined what you did (that grass skiing thing never quite caught on). Now, for better or worse, those days are over. Humans have brought the outdoors inside, or they’ve simply recreated it outdoors, so your favorite adventure activity has an all-new, man-made, super convenient location.

Read the rest here at SKYE.
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