Blogging

Homeless man drowns in Connecticut River

Not a lot of information right now (and maybe there won't much to come) but a homeless man named Keith Rainville drowned in the Connecticut River in Springfield yesterday and his body was recovered this afternoon.  Apparently he and some friends were trying to cool off when Mr. Rainville slipped away.

Yesterday a homeless man and woman came into Arise to ask for advice, and when I asked where they were staying, they said, "The Riverfront."  They said quite a few others were also camped out there, but that's been true for years, especially in the summer.

On Thursday, a woman I've known for more than 15 years,  who's been an on again, off again member of Arise, stopped into Arise to help with petitioning.  She was on her second day of a three day ban from the Worthington St. Women's Shelter, because she'd been complaining about the bedbugs and scabies infection.

"Where did you sleep last night?" I asked her.

"In the doorway of an apartment on ________ Street.," she said, "with a couple other people.  A few people in the building brought us down water and some food."

The new women's shelter has been built, but the women haven't been moved up the street yet-- the men have been moved into it instead while their quarters are renovated.

"The men have bedbugs too,"  she said.

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When I started this blog three years ago,  Arise was at the tail end of a long fight to have the city to stop ignoring homeless people and help them.  Although there's much still to be done, the city has stepped up through the Office for Housing/Special Homeless Initiative.  Finally, after many, many years of people and organizations asking why you had to become homeless first, to get any help,  preventing homelessness has become a major strategy.  Many homeless policy people think they thought up this strategy all by themselves, but no-- it's simply that they had the power to make it happen.

I've kept homelessness a major focus of this blog, but gradually my day to day contact with homeless people has lessened.  I've felt less comfortable writing about homelessness in general if I couldn't balance that with my own ongoing perceptions.  Meanwhile I've become consumed with the environment assaults against poor people-- against all people, really.  I won't write about this now.  But two months ago I just stopped writing.


Thinking about starting again has felt like starting over. Yet I'm going to try.

Photo from rbglasson's photostream at Flickr.

My favorite cartoonist auctioning work for Haiti

I discovered the Laugh Out Loud cats on BoingBoing a couple of years ago...don't know why they tug on my heartstrings so much

but they do.  If you go to Hobotopia, you'll have a chance to bid on the cartoon in this post and all proceeds will go to benefit relief work in Haiti (and you'll get to discover the great drawings and characters created by Adam Koford).

Where is Tony? and other conundrums of homeless bloggers

Maintaining a blog when you're homeless is not easy. You might not be welcome at the internet cafe, or have the money to buy time somewhere else, and if you have a little notebook, you have to guard it with your life. (The blogger at 21st Century Homeless just prevented the theft of his laptop at McDonald's with his multi-purpose pocket tool!) Still, feeling that sense of connection with mostly unknown readers keeps many homeless bloggers online. But sometimes bloggers just disappear, and you don't know if it's because their life got better, or worse, or even if they're still alive at all.

Tony has been a frequent, wry voice at Homeless Man Speaks, but for a couple of weeks, no one could find him. "Where is Tony?" the unknown author of the blog kept writing. Well, Tony turned up at a local hospital and the news is not good-- the Big C, as the author says, on top of all his other health problems. Tony is out of the hospital now, back on the street, and thanking God for socialized medicine (he's in Canada), so he can get some of what he needs to stay alive a little longer.

The woman who writes Adventures of Homeless Girl recently had the sad experience of seeing the house that used to be her home being renovated by a new owner. She's closing in on three years of homelessness.

Things are still looking up for Brianna Karp at  Girl's Guide to Homelessness.  Thanks to public pressure created through her blog, Walmart returned her impounded trailer (quite a story, read about it) and she got a job. But she's feeling like a lot of her good fortune is sheer, dumb luck-- and how much luck is there to go around for homeless people?


Tom Armstrong at Homeless Tom is grateful that his blog, which is mostly about Buddhism and the search for enlightenment, has been acknowledged and honored by the Buddhist community. He's survived a recent stint in jail and is still writing. But over on his other blog, Sacramento Homeless, he's writing about how now, no one is allowed to camp in the city at the same site for more than 24 hours. The director of a local social service agency is putting out the call for anyone in the community who has property they'd be willing to let homeless people stay on for that 24 hour period. There aren't enough shelter beds in the city and Tom himself spent two nights completely "out on the streets" and remarks that he probably was breaking the law.

The Welcome to Nickelsville Seattle blog hasn't had an entry since the day after their tent city was closed down by the city on October 4. The tent city is up again, 90 residents allowed to stay for three weeks at University Christian Church's parking lot, but no one knows what the future holds, and winter is coming.

On the advocacy side of the homeless conundrum, Diane Nilan at Invisible Homeless Kids is appalled by the living conditions of homeless families and children. She says thatin one of the most affluent counties in the country, homeless families and adults are given less attention than homeless pets.

Mark Horvath of Invisible People TV is back from a weeks-long road trip documenting the lives and the options of our nation's homeless. He has a fascinating and poignant slide show of some of the people he met at his Flickr site. You owe it to yourself to take a look.

"Girl's Guide to Homelessness" gets well-deserved national attention

What a nice surprise! I checked the headlines on CNN when I got home from a meeting tonight and saw an article about Brianna Karp, author of A Girl's Guide to Homelessness. This is one of the best-written blogs on homelessness I've come across, and I've had a link to it on my blog for some time, but I haven't visited since before vacation. Looks like she's getting a fair amount of national attention and it's well-deserved. Check it out.

Dangerous to be homeless: an apology

I wrote a post last month about the death of homeless Northampton resident Arthur Polier. Later I found a comment about the post on BlogoWogo that includes the following:

My son, the son of Arthur Polier read this story and took offence to you implying that his father should die...that is a terrible thing to say.

Despite whatever circumstance anyone person may encounter in their life, we as a society have no right to pass judgement and for your information, Arthur...affectionately known as David, his middle name was a warm and giving person who succumbed to his alcoholism and that does not give you or anyone the right to say they should die.

So let me say first that I apologize to Arthur Polier's family for any offense my post caused. I think the offending portion of the post was: "Police are saying he died of natural causes. What I guess we can say is that it's natural that a 50 year-old man living in a swamp on the edge of society, should die."

There's no such thing as a natural death when you're living on the streets. It is just plain dangerous to be homeless.

Homeless women are at quadruple the risk of sexual assault. Maybe that was in the mind of the homeless woman from Joliet, Illinois when she saved a 10 year old girl from being kidnapped and assaulted last month.

Homeless people are often robbed and beaten-- sometimes by each other. That's what happened when a homeless woman was beaten with a piece of wood last Saturday in Raleigh, NC. She's now listed in good condition at the hospital. (Hope they keep her a few extra days.)

Homeless people are the victim of accidents. Melissa Sjostrom, 33, was crossing the street in Tampa, Florida when she was hit and killed by a 17 year old driver who then fled the scene of the accident. Something very funky's going on with why it the case was closed without an arrest and then opened two months later after queries by the St. Petersburg, Florida Times.

Homeless people can die from exposure not just from the cold but also the heat. Pheonix, Arizona officials and agencies are opening cooling centers and handing out water to homeless people this week, where temperatures are expected to be about 115 degrees.

Sometimes homeless people just die. Back in Tampa, Florida, a homeless man was found dead last week only one day after another homeless man was found dead less than a block away. Neither death is considered suspicious by the police. In Anchorage, Alaska, yet another homeless man was found dead-- the eighth in just a few months-- and this death, unlike the others, appears to be a murder.

Each year on December 21st, the longest night of the year, cities across the country commemorate Homeless Persons Memorial Day, a remembrance of all those who have died without a home during the year. I wait for and works towards the year when the numbers decline-- but it won't be this year.

Removing homeless links is painful

Every so often I go through the homeless links on my blogroll to look for those that have become inactive. I try to wait until I'm pretty sure the blog is dead-- at least six months and sometimes longer.

I always wonder: Did the author's situation improve? Did the author become too discouraged to write anymore? Has the cause for which a person blogged become resolved? or become hopeless?

In any case, there's some pretty good writing on some of these blogs, and at the least they are useful for historical purposes. So even though I'm removing them, here's a list. Maybe someday they'll spring to new life?

Formerly Homeless
Homeless in Jax
Homeless United for Friendship and Freedom
Just Another Blog (from L.A.)
NH Under the Bridge Project

If you know of any homeless or formerly homeless-written blogs, or other good blogs about homelessness, please let me know.

Old Dog New Tricks

My last post asked folks to guess what the lovely photo I displayed was-- and half an hour later, Matt P. did exactly that! I thought he also must have seen and been fascinated by the picture. I asked him how he guessed, and he told me he'd moused over the photo, gotten the name, then typed it into Google Image Search!

Well, duh! I guess I'd just never noticed you could do that... and how many years have I been using a computer? So if I ever want to do this kind of puzzle again, I must remember to rename the photo before putting it up.

While we're on the subject of photos, how is it that Stumble Upon has come to learn that a stunning or unusual photo is likely to win my approval? Maybe that one's not too hard to answer, but what are the algorithms for deciding why I've faved a vivid, well-designed website on weather? The design or the subject? Content or form?

Photo of Katie from SRivera's photostream at Flickr's Creative Commons.

PS: I love finding the right photo for a post-- sometimes takes me longer than the actual writing-- and I try to give accurate credit. Why doesn't this seem important to many other bloggers?

A lot of links....

I just added a new blog, New Dream, to my blogroll under "A world to live in." The blog links a multiplicity of issues to sustainability and the environment. Check it out.

I realize I have a lot of links, seems like more than most bloggers. The thing is, I'm sure I've barely touched on what's available in the blogosphere...but when I find something good, I want others to know about it.

It's just about time for another round-up of news from the homeless blogs; hope to get to that soon. In the meantime: Read! Explore! At the least, you'll wind up feeling grateful for the number of people committed to creating a better world.

Photo from ~Dezz's~ photostream at Flickr.

Flaw in Blogger: where are comments?

Bloggers love it when people send in comments about particular posts. I approved a very nice comment yesterday from Alicia, who'd spent time on my blog and enjoyed it. Now I can't find the comment, because Blogger's dashboard doesn't say which post the comment goes with! A little thing...but I wish they'd find a fix.

Linking to blogs about homelessness, environmental justice and Western Mass. happenings

I'm eighteen months into writing this blog and one of the resources I hope my readers take advantage of is the extensive list of links that I've compiled and try to keep updated.

The biggest list is I keep is of blogs that write about homelessness-- in particular those written by homeless and formerly homeless people themselves, although they're not that easy to find. I could put in many more links to agencies that work to end homelessness, but most of them already have a voice; still, I've added a couple that are particularly well-done-- L.A.s Homeless Blog, for example.

Some homeless blogs come and go quickly, but many writers have made a long-term commitment to their blogs. Homeless Man Speaks describes life on the streets in just a few lines of dialogue a day. Oldtimer Speaks Out is dedicated to homeless and other veterans, and is currently deep into a tutorial about house-building by Habitat for Humanity. Michael at SLO Homeless speaks with thoughtfully and experience about the struggles homeless people face and how hard it can be sometimes to get housed people to understand.

Rare and valuable are those blogs that follow the people's movements for housing around the world. Squatter City posts about the resiliance and tragedy of squatter communities in Afghanistan, Brazil and elsewhere; Save Feral Human Habitat covers tent cities, homeless activism, and saving the Canadian environment.

Unlike blogs about homelessness, environmental blogs are easy to find and there are so many good ones that my link list is more representative and more about what I find and like than it is comprehensive. Native Harvest, the home of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, promotes indigenous autonomy as well as a catalogue of products including wild rice, organic coffee and native arts. It was founded by poet and warrior Winona LaDuke. Inhabitant is about "forward design for the world we inhabit."

Last but not least I like to collect Western Mass blogs or blogs by Western Mass. authors, even when they run in a different political gamut or aren't political at all. Grace the Dog tells odd little stories loosely about journalism and the media. Exploring Western Mass blends the past and the present with exquisite photographs of our region. Springfield Intruder takes a passionate and acerbic view of Springfield's neighborhoods and politics.

Do take the time to check out the variety of visions in the blogging world today.

Graphic from the International Alliance of Inhabitants

PVCentral launches-- a site for valley bloggers!

A couple of months ago I got an email from blogger Bill Dusty, author of The Springfield Intruder, with an interesting suggestion: what if five to eight valley bloggers got together on a central page to provide a service to Lower Pioneer Valley residents and, maybe, to make some money through advertising? Hmmm, I thought. I'm fine with both parts of that. I certainly hope my blog is already a service of sorts, and although I don't have advertising on my site, I've got nothing against money.

Of the initial group of us, I knew Bill a little already-- he describes himself as a conservative and he and I have sparred back and forth on our blogs for a while. I've known Mike Dobbs of Out of the Inkwell for some years-- he's also a reporter for the Springfield Reminder. Tommy Devine's personal blog, Tommy Devine's Online Journal, has already enthralled me with its personal tale of unearthing family secrets and finding a long-lost brother and I did feel like I knew him somewhat. Being in a blogging group with these folks would be interesting!

Since then we've added Tony Mateus of in the valley and Mark Bail of Granby01033. We hope to add a few more (and I hope some of them are women).

PVCentral officially launched on Saturday, and I've added a button that Bill Dusty designed to my site. Click on it and you'll go to our central site, where you will find our most recent posts, links to our sites and other valley resources, podcasts and a forum.

I don't know about the others, but not all of my posts will also get posted to PVCentral. PVCentral will stay local, and about half of my posts (I think) are not, but are either more personal or more global.

I'm particularly looking forward to learning new skills such as podcasts. Guess I will have to get the sound on my computer fixed (haven't had it since a tech reinstalled Windows ME) and maybe, not too long from now, upgrade my operating system.

But writing is really what its all about.
Graphic from Chuck at Flickr.

Playing Catch-Up

Every now and then I'm reminded that my blog doesn't fit easily into a niche. Most blogs that cover local events are entirely local. Blogs that deal with larger issues like the environment or crime mention local news only when it illustrates a point. But I want to do both, even knowing it may make my blog less interesting to two different groups of readers!

Momentarily, I'm at a local impasse-- lots going on in the background, lots percolating, nothing I want to write about yet.

On the global front, lots I want to share, but the news has gradually built up and I don't have time to tie them together the way I would usually. Still, they're too good not share, so I will.

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365 days of blogging: 11 tips about writing

Do all new bloggers learn the same lessons? There's so much information on blogging out there, but surprisingly little that is comprehensive. So let me say that I hope the following narrative and information will be useful to all other sixty year old political bloggers without advertising-- and a few other folks, too. I welcome comments and other tips and experiences from fellow bloggers.

Michaelann Land's initial purpose was to allow me to stay in touch with day to day organizing because I was no longer able to stay on at Arise for Social Justice, an anti-poverty organization more than twenty years ago, but Arise was out of money, and I had bills to pay. (We're doing much better and I'm still on the board and on an organizing committee.)

I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do when I started-- reach and influence readers to take action on homelessness and poverty-- but I didn't know that over the first year I would also improve my writing skills, learn more about issues I care about, and discover diverse and talented communities of fellow bloggers with something to share.

I actually started my blog on April 1st, but consider May 19 the real anniversary date-- that's when I discovered there was such a thing as stats and that I could actually find out how many people were reading my blog. I was humbled to look at the numbers but also learned to take pleasure in each new reader.

One of the decisions I had to make early on was how much of my personal life to share on my blog. I knew that complete anonymity, even if desired, wasn't possible. I'm pretty involved in local organizing, and quite a number of people know at least something about me. What I do freely share about myself (if it's interesting) is what I'm thinking and feeling, and I share what I've always done as an organizer: the connections I see between things, and the sense that solutions exist and change is possible.

At first almost all of my posts were original writing and primarily linked to specific organizing campaigns happening in Springfield, MA. As time went on, I began to include environmental and criminal justice issues, and even a bit of humor (although not everyone appreciated it-- one person on my blogroll demanded to be removed). Initially I posted only when I felt like it-- but I started feeling like it more and more; by August, I was even using a bit of my precious vacation time elbowing for a space on the public computers at Wellfleet library. What I posted during vacation, though, was the poetry that came to me on the beach. If folks didn't like it, they didn't have to read it.

With some embarrassment, I admit I had barely read another blog prior to starting my own. I didn't know how big the blogging world was and how much extraordinarily good stuff was being written. Eventually I recognized that bloggers borrow from each other! (Duh!) So I started to borrow also, but usually mixed linked material with at least some original writing.

To some degree I have ignored the common advice for new bloggers to find a niche and to stick with it. I have that luxury partly because I don't have advertising on my blog and therefore don't have to add the dimension of money-making to my considerations. I want my blog to be readable and enjoyable, I want readers, but I decided never to let that desire influence what I write-- although it does influence how often I blog. So I've developed strategies for developing content.

So here are the writing lessons I've learned so far and some tips about composing a blog::

1. Have a focus for your blog but let it evolve. Don't be too rigid about content.
2. Decide what you do and don't want to share about yourself.
3. Write as much original material as you can; don't let your entire content be borrowed.
4. When you do borrow, don't copy the whole post of another blogger and make sure to link back! Give your reader a reason to go to another site; it'll pay off eventually.
5. Watch out for libel! The best online source of info I've found so far is the Bloggers' FAQ at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Check out their Intellectual Property section, too.
   
6. Keep a journal of works in progress and keep adding to it.
7. Save articles and posts on topics you're interested in; when something current happens, you'll have some background material ready. Use Google Alerts and such to keep up on news in your area of interest.
8. Don't post without reading what you've written one more time and go back and edit, even after posting, if you need to.
9. Don't get hung up, though-- not everything has to be a great work of art.
10. Take a break when you need it. Don't get addicted to blogging!.
11. Stay true to yourself.

Just so you know...

I had two comments to approve this morning, one positive and one critical, and I approved both of them, but they never appeared! Blogger's great but not perfect. I have no problem with comments that disagree with a perspective in my posts, as long as they're not excessively rude.

My one year anniversary writing this blog is coming up next week and I will be self-indulgent and let you know what I've learned. Thanks for reading!

May Round-Up of News from the Homeless Blogs

When I started this blog, I did a fairly exhaustive hunt for blogs by and/or primarily about homeless people. I found a good number though not as many as I'd hoped, and put them on my blogroll. That was almost a year ago.

Since then, five or six blogs have disappeared or become inactive. If a blog owner hasn't written in five months, I figure they're gone. Two blogs about New Orleans homeless haven't been updated since February, when the injunction prohibiting the destruction of public housing was denied and the tent city that had grown up across from City Hall was forced to dismantle. Clearly, these blogs are linked with the state of organizing. I'm hoping they and the organizing recover.

Many bloggers seem to be taking a moment to think deeply about the bigger picture and root causes. Tim Harris at Apesma's Lament talks about how the huge growth in the prison population and the number of homeless people that began in the 80"s is linked to globalization. Oldtimer Speaks Out has been writing about how psychological and physical damage affects veterans, and how it can lead to homelessness. The latest post is about Rand Corporation's study, "The Invisible Wounds of War." Wandering Vets has the last part of a series on Counting the Homeless, who it serves and how homeless counts obscure the truth. Homeless in Abbotsford, B.C. is blogging about homeless counts, too: the post title is Herd Management.

Jackie Dowd at the 13th Juror is writing about how her home state of Florida is Number One again in documented violence against homeless people. By the way, USAToday has an article on how several states, including Massachusetts, are looking to toughen laws against violence against the homeless. (Couldn't find any reference to it at the Commonwealth's website, but without a docket number, that's not unusual.)

Last but not least, Kevin Barbieux at The Homeless Guy has an apartment! And Homeless Man Speaks talks about what to do with a $5 donation.
Graphic from Riacale's photostream at Flickr.

Auto site talks about biofuels

Wow-- here's a blog called Kicking Tires that, among other things, is blogging about biofuels, and how one tank of gas equals 528 pounds of corn-- enough to feed a person for a year, and suggesting that the U.S. change its policy on biofuels. You can research cars, write a review of your own car, find out about recalls, buy and sell-- in other words, a regular car site but writing about hunger and the environment.. Hope for the world?

A blogging curiosity

Like all bloggers, I imagine, I use a site to track statistics about my blog. I don't have ads, so tracking my "revenue" isn't something I need to do, but I am curious about where the people who visit my blog come from and how they got there. MapStats lists the city and country of origin, and, if the visitor uses a search engine, what phrase they searched for.

A couple of times I've thought that visitors who want to pay a return visit don't remember my address, but they remember a phrase or post title, and type that in to get back. I mean, how many times might someone type the exact phrase "Thomas Friedman is an idiot" into Google? (Well, maybe more than I think.) But that's the title of one of my posts.

Recently I've noticed a fair number of people are arriving at my blog by typing in the search phrase "No rest for the weary"-- another one of my fairly recent blog titles. Now, what would bring people from places as diverse as Jersey City, New Jersey, Rowland Heights, California, Pine Bluff Arkansas and Farnum Royal, Sough, UK to search for that phrase? Is it just a coincidence? Does anybody know?

Photo: Leo Reynolds

I have a lot to say - & two snow poems

Got home a couple hours early because of the snow-- and I want to blog because I've felt the weight of words building up the last few days-- things I want to tell people, concerns and the occasional triumph I want to share-- yet I have to be honest and say I have no idea how much my blog is really read or matters. But I write anyway because it is one of the things I can do, and I am obliged to do the things I can!

But before I plunge in for the afternoon, two snow poems by me:

her mom trudges in sneakers
thru the snow
while she, five years old,
trudges beside her
wearing red dancing shoes
that look like fresh blood on linen
bought in a previous moment of hope
totally wrong for the weather
but all that's left now
is to walk on dreams
for protection.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Not for ten paces
can my mind empty itself
even in white snow

Photo by Kirk Lau

A personal note

Haven't been feeling so great lately and have been really busy with my job so not blogging as much as I like, but just got back from an Arise meeting and that always psychs me up more than it wears me out, so in a bit I'll try to catch up with some homeless news, local and otherwise.

Someone who reads this blog told me it was interesting that I went back and forth between the personal and the political in my posts. That surprised me a bit, I'll admit, because although I do sometimes share my personal observations, I don't think I tell you much about my personal life-- not where I live, or the names of my children, not where I work or whether I'm in a relationship-- I suppose the longer I blog, the more that will come out.

Local readers, of course, know me more well. I am still banned from MassLive and still don't know why. As much as my views differ from most of the MassLive posters, the Springfield forum is still a community of sorts, with the opportunity (even if frequently squandered) to share information and build a collective knowledge. I am, however, one of the very few people to post under my name, so I don't know much about my fellow forum members-- and I don't comb their posts looking for clues, either. Still, it doesn't feel good to get cut off. from that community.

The two pictures in this post are two sides of me.