Remix Culture: Cross-Pollinating With Our Pluralism

This month we're acknowledging that where we come from counts (see this urban psychology article on the geography of temperament, and take this quiz to pinpoint how to make life choices "congruent with your temperament") -- and by bringing what we uniquely have to offer, we're cross-pollinating the culture. And we extra-extra-extra love to hear this => Pluralism is always practical: when we draw on our own mixed identities we're more creative!

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Meanwhile a Third Culture Kid and food activist in Colorado says no to the American predilection for huge cups of coffee consumed in the car, and yes to the communion found in ethnic dining rituals from her childhood and travels.

An American born and raised in Japan finds a way to bridge the cultural divide through the whimsical folk art of etegami.

So much good stuff coming our way, impossible to share it all....here's another way to get on the same page with us: we're now attempting to round up the zillions of resonant links that fly past us every day -- like these ones about global careers, and international politics and the hybrid souls we all possess.

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If you're in New York on the 25th, don't miss an evening about "How to Run the World & Hybrid Reality", presented by expat+HAREM's global nomad salon coproducer Janera Soerel. Global adventurer-scholar Parag Khanna and his wife Ayesha will introduce their new institute exploring human-tech co-evolution.

And for the collectors, from the filmmaker, author, producer, and musician known as DJ Spooky comes this compilation of essays examining 500 years of collaborative creation, "from the history of stop-motion photography to Muslim influences on early hip-hop."

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

What are you remixing in your personal culture?

Awkward Traveling. Poised Interculturalists. Native People. Hopping Places

The more time we devote to following our interests online it seems the more relevance we find. The problem: how can we ever share all the fabulousness?! The solution: rounding up zillions of links resonant to our community that cross my screen.

• This post at The Awkward Traveler -- "I wander because wandering is where I fit in" -- echoes recent expat+HAREM guest posts about the bumbling of intercultural greetings and the sensations of exile.

• At China Expat, Carolyn Vines, the author of Black and (A)broad: traveling beyond the limitations of identity, considers the changes in a woman's identity after an international relocation. Moving away from our cultural context, she writes, we learn to see ourselves with different eyes.

• If you grew up in the Americas you grew up with Native American history of some kind and at the very least, reflected in place names. Facebook hosts a massive collection of antique photos of Native Americans, organized by tribe, including ethnographic and commercial images as well as family portraits.

• This poised Seattle Voices TV interview with hybrid soul Nassim Assefi (Iranian-American doctor! author! humanitarian! ) will interest interculturalists.

• Diane Caldwell, an original contributor to the Expat Harem anthology, once ate Jack Kerouac's peanut butter. On her new blog the free spirit writes a requiem for Asmalimescit, Istanbul's hoppingest back alley.

• Have national tragedies revealed uncomfortable truths about your native people/politics? asks the ever-perspicacious ML Awanohara at Seen the Elephant

• Blogging, branding, and dealing with doubt are among the 10 secrets to managing your career overseas according to John Falchetto at the Undercover Recruiter.

• Calcutta! Expats! Jazz! Don't miss this intriguing globe-trotting/gin-soaked debut in a new excerpt of Piano Demon.

Groupon Ad Fiasco + Kenneth Cole Twitter Debacle = False Cosmopolitanism

Groupon's SuperBowl ad fiasco when the company attempted to mix consumerism with sensitive political, environmental, cultural, economic and social issues, and the Kenneth Cole Twitter debacle which appeared to make light of unrest in Cairo are examples of the bellyflops that come from false cosmopolitanism.

I wrote about this back in August of 2010.

We’re suffering from a false sense of cosmopolitanism. Access to the worldwide Interwebs leads us to imagine ourselves global thinkers. But we’re not -- unless we’re true xenophiles, bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds.

Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.

“Xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual realm, with higher and higher stakes. How are you preparing yourself for a wider world?

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Related: Global Dexterity

Custom Creative: The Making Of An Authentic Indie Life

Happy blizzard -- or dense fog in the morning! We've got entrepreneurial social media life/work things to do in the low-visibility season ahead. BTW here's an overview never before available: If you're at all interested you can now peek behind-the-scenes of my top five cultural producing projects related to but not strictly expat+HAREM. Hint: Family culture clashes! Art historic soap operas of imperial proportion! [link removed, no longer available]

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Our shiny new Facebook page replaces a group set to retire one random day. Don't want to lose you in the shuffle. Please post on our FB wall any kind of culturati link you're liking today.

Do we look older more experienced? We just celebrated our first full year of bloghood! 23 guest bloggers to thank, we're also grateful for 2300 comments which took us to surprising intersections of culture and identity. Here we all weigh in on the posts which affected us the most.

2011 starts with the editor of Matador Life Leigh Shulman contrasting the peregrinations of a fictional exile with her own rolling stone life. Why do we leave the places we know, and is the melancholy of disconnect any different if it's elective or imposed on us?

YOUR PRO GLOBAL NICHE IS A WEB PLATFORM...

Not just a dreamy concept of world citizenship, your global niche is about "blooming where you're planted" in a holistic way, being creative and entrepreneurial to find happiness, growth and success wherever you are and in all your aspects.

In conjunction with creative biz consultancy Turquoise Poppy, expat+HAREM is excited to lead a January 22 demonstration of how to build your global niche through social media.

Not geographically convenient, or complete newbie? Cultural creatives and mobile progressives everywhere can now start learning the web tools, techniques and technology: our new mailing list will get you started with free tutorials and keep you posted about next steps, like our upcoming mastermind program for creative entrepreneurs.

That's a high-impact online course where a supportive set of your international, creative peers will help you build your global niche on the web. +++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We loved Dr. Brene Brown's recent TEDxHouston talk on  wholeheartedness and its root in expressing our vulnerability.

But the blog of longtime expat Diana Baur and majorly creative entrepreneur (the American potter is an innkeeper in Italy) sharpens the point for identity adventurers and global nomads like us. "Wholehearted people don't have an externally-driven directive about living correctly."

To live authentically individual lives we need to embrace the parts of ourselves that don't fit anywhere.

Publication to watch --> BETA is an about-to-be-released quarterly print mag from the global online travel network Matador. All about motion, journey and place, apparently the cheeky thing subtitled the topography of living will be sold at "some of our favorite camel markets and opium dens worldwide."

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

In the new year we're looking at where others end and we begin. "What are you redefining?" we asked.

Beth Wettergreen, the new liaison between a private university in Istanbul and U of Maryland, is struggling with the concept of 'private life' in Turkey. "Here, one is almost never unobserved. I have a feeling that the notion of a truly private life is reserved for the upper middle class and upper class."

Meanwhile another expat is facing the boundaries of a life vision at odds with cultural expectations of a woman who 'works' from home yet is not a traditional housewife.

"I risk appearing rude and living up to the stereotypes of the self-centered American in order to further myself along the path that feels right to me - even if others can't see it or understand it."

What creative, custom life/work solution are you looking for?

Masterminding How To Deal With Social Media Anxiety

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group). These are my thoughts on a session dealing with social media anxiety.

Successful social media use is ALL ABOUT THE FILTERS. Definitely a good topic for a mastermind because the solutions presented this week have the potential to revolutionize your experience with social media and that is major.

My first thought is *use automating tools* so you can stock your feeds at your convenience, decide when the info goes out and where to, and you don't have to visit the sites to post. Much less overwhelm. I use SOCIAL OOMPH for my twitterfeed. It's free, and dead simple. (I also post extemporaneously, but for purposes of this response on automation, that doesn't matter.) Social Oomph allows me to enter as many posts as I want, choose the time and date. Hashtags. Only thing I can't do is post the same tweet twice or "@" replies. You use Networked Blogs at Facebook, I see, great. Email mailing providers also let you post a link to FB and Twitter. You can hook up LinkedIn to Twitter to post at LI your Tweets. For Twitter if you try a third party app like HootSuite or Seesmic or Tweetdeck you can break your subscriptions into categories and only peruse one category at a time. "Friends", "Photographers". "China." That might help you dip a toe in.

Also, you can create a category based on a search term so you can easily respond to tweets on your favorite topics without having to wade through lots of material. So, my first advice is USE SOME FORM OF AUTOMATION on each platform and alternate it with spontaneous contributions, reactions to others, replies. (There is such a thing as overdoing it, and obviously not being present which makes people feel they are being pushed at by a machine.) On the Twitter site itself you can use "Lists" to group your subscriptions and only peruse what one list is tweeting. Personally I have used lists to expand who I follow without making my main stream 10,000 people strong! Here is a good list of "power twitter tips" from Chris Brogan "in five categories: intent, technical, business, integrated usage, and off-twitter. Here's a post about "How to overcome the concern that social media is a time suck" with tips on strategic following and here's a personal branding checklist for Twitter usage. Someone here mentioned to weed out tweeters who 'don't say thanks'. To me, I'd rather not read tweets solely thanking people -- empty tweets that say "thanks for the RT!" are a last case scenario. Sometimes I do it when I'm falling behind, but it's of little value.

A way to better thank someone is to look thru their stream and RT or react to something of theirs. To engage with them, then it's not about keeping score, but the fact that it becomes natural to be involved with them.

You might like this latest post from TRIBAL WRITER's Justine Musk about building an author platform with social media (whether you're an 'author' or not). She writes that the path comes partly from 'strategy' and partly from following your instinct.  Figuring out why you're driven to write (or whatever else creative thing you're doing) and sharing that "inkling, which will lead to other inklings, which lead the way. You'll promote your own work while you're at it."  Musk also she talks about how your blog is your hub, and all these other sites are spokes where you meet your network. "And those different platforms require different forms of content. But you can take your big content – long blog entries, or ebooks or whitepapers — and break it into smaller chunks and bites and tweets. You can take your small content and explode it into something more in-depth. You can transcribe your podcasts and post on your blog; you can tweet cool quotes from your video interviews; you get the idea. Your content feeds your content feeds your content." In a recent Third Tribe seminar Sonia Simone interviewed Naomi Dunsford who said "scare off the people who aren't interested". That could be by your topic alone, your attention to detail, your tone, your seriousness or flippancy, whatever. But basically, you need your people to gather, and how will they know if they're you're people if you're holding back and trying to please everyone? You mentioned not wanting to break down your blog posts. Here's a list of 40 things you can tweet that aren't derived from your blog postings. Good ideas, show the depth of experience and expertise you can demonstrate.

Future Investing: Creating What We Want

Happy end-of-Gregorian-calendar-year holidays to everyone! Here, the gifts came early when Turkey's top-selling novelist and all-around goddess Elif Shafak named Tales from the Expat Harem among the 5 best books on Turkey, calling it "colorful, humanistic and sincere." Read an excerpt of Elif's foreword to the 2005 anthology. But what we love most about this time of year is the view ahead...and our chance to own it. As Nancy Duarte says: "The future isn't where you're going to go, it's what you invent.”

The best forward-looking news we've heard in a while: the economic crisis has a silver lining. This month we're pleased to introduce futurists who see the worldwide recession as a larger transformation -- where we all play an important role in deepening our relationship with wealth. And there's something we can do about it *right now*.

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We've been taking ownership of our motivations this month: facing the ironic post-Communist response to Lady Gaga's anything-goes identity adventure. Copping to the lengths we'll go to become an insider. And learning how *not* to write about our 'happening prone' life.

We've also increased our stake in the Girl Effect campaign, blogging about the crucial role 12-year-old girls play in changing impoverished communities -- and ways we can make this precarious crossroads a safer place to launch a life.

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AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

I'm psyched to be on the advisory board of Turkish Women's International Network, a brand new community of Turkophile pros revolving around the TED-like talks its members give. Consider applying if you have family, cultural or professional ties to Turks.

If you're a digital nomad, lifestyle designer or location independent (or wanna be!) this logistical community for the work-at-home-while-abroad lifestyle wants you: NuNomad.

Meanwhile Symbionomics invites people around the world to contribute video to their online forum about the making of our next economy: driven by creative entrepreneurs, leveraging mobile and social media, crowd-sourcing. Deadline to pledge financial support for their Kickstarter campaign is new year's eve. Talk about investing in the future...

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YOUR THOUGHTS

Private equity adviser Hollis Wagenstein first crossed our path in New York during the Expat Harem book tour of 2006. Now the self-described "Turkaholic and Ottomaniac" has fun answering our question "What terms do you use to describe your cross-border life?" As the 'Pre-turk' awaits her new Turkish citizenship and speaks 'Turklish' with her husband, she says "If anyone else ever heard us using it, we'd probably wind up in strait-jackets!"  Since her stepdaughter married a Puerto Rican that branch of the family calls themselves 'the Turkoricans'.

What are your neoculture predictions for the new year? Winners? Losers?

Talking to She's Next

Happy to contribute a 60-second She'sNext interview for Hana Kamm's inaugural month. Here I'm talking about how multifaceted, 21st century women can find their global niche.

In this series of inspirational videos, I join other inspiring women around the web and the world in the fields of entrepreneurship, digital life, wellness, empowerment, and personal development, including Alexis Neely, Gloria Feldt, White Hot Truth's Danielle LaPorte, Ali Brown of the Millionaire Protege Club, Courtney Martin, Carol Roth of The Entrepreneur Equation, Aliza Sherman, The Flourishing Muse Hiro Boga, SOBCon's Liz Strauss, Tara Gentile, Laura Roeder, Chris Carr, Laurel Touby, the location independent Lea Woodward, The Suitcase Entrepreneur Natalie Sisson, Shama Kabani, Dusti Arab, Tara Sophia Mohr, Tamar Weinberg and Penelope Trunk.

Making The Psychic Limbo Of Global Citizens A Productive State

The expat+HAREM COMMUNITY AIMS TO HELP YOU: 1) DISCOVER your psychic peers + global community 2) CREATE a hybrid identity from your many worlds

Why do you need our help? The short answer: Because liminal life is a bittersweet limbo -- coming, going, never quite arriving -- and here at expat+HAREM the community embraces this unmoored and central reality of our globetrotting, multicultural, hybrid times.

A PLACE WHERE DIGITAL NOMADS, EXPATS, IMMIGRANTS, FUTURISTS AND WORLD CULTURALISTS ARE UNIQUELY SUITED TO SUCCEED

The psychic limbo and identity adventure global citizens experience today is expat+HAREM's sweet spot. Our neoculture.

This neoculture is our situation in life and our world view. What we work to make sense of, and to capitalize on.

Here at expat+HAREM we've defined the problem, and provide the solution.

Glo· bal· niche, n.

a psychic solution to your global identity crisis

[More about Anastasia Ashman, the founder of this global niche.]

MAKING LIMBO A PRODUCTIVE STATE Limbo is usually considered a place in-between. A state of suspended animation. Paralysis, a spinning of the wheels. Nowheresville. But it can also be an unconstrained place where anything is possible. That's how expat+HAREM choses to see it. Multifaceted people like us have strength and flexibility and experience and access to multiple perspectives. These are all assets.

WE'RE IN THE VANGUARD AND NEED EACH OTHER Globalization has had an unfortunate disenfranchising effect. (Perhaps like many in our community you've been there personally!) However, despite the resistance and misunderstanding and worrying 'purity' movements we're witnessing in populations large and small, at expat+HAREM we believe fostering our particular dialogue of culture and identity is a way forward. A chance to find new and meaningful connection to the world while making sense of conflicting situations.

IT'S NOT ALL BIG PICTURE Sure, we like to talk about the big picture -- whole hemispheres and societies! -- but at our heart we're concerned with the smallest details of the individual. Navigating relationships with people in your life. Achieving psychic location independence. Negotiating our personal connection with the many worlds we love to belong to. That's how we'll find our global niche.

HERE'S WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY "WE'LL HELP YOU FIND YOUR GLOBAL NICHE": a psychic solution to your global identity crisis.

COMMON INTEREST AND EXPERIENCE DEFINES US

Our most important bonds are no longer solely decided by geography, nationality or even blood. When we find where we uniquely belong in the world we've found our global niche.

expat+HAREM, the global niche embodies the Expat Harem concept* -- localized foreigner, outsider on the inside -- while speaking to intentional travelers, identity adventurers and global citizens of all kinds.

This 2-year archive of neoculture discussions delves into perspective on the crossroads and dichotomies of our hybrid lives:

• modern existences in historic places
• deep-rooted traditions translated in mobile times
• limiting stereotypes revisited for wider meaning
• the expat mindset as it evolves from nationalism to globalism

More.

THOUGHTS ON HYBRID LIFE WRITING Combining outsider-view-from-the-inside and journey of self-realization, we think expat/emigree/immigrant literature deserves a shelf of its own.

+++ OUR ROOTS +++ Based on the original Expat Harem concept by Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen

expat+HAREM, the global niche is the archive of a group blog and community site launched in 2009 by Anastasia Ashman, coeditor with Jennifer Eaton Gökmen of Tales from the Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey.

* The site is inspired by the cultural embrace and self-exploration of that best-selling and critically acclaimed 2005 expatriate literature collection.

+ DETAILS: media coverage, academic uses, and awards for the anthology created and edited with Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, compiling the work of 32 international Expat Harem writers.

+ BEST 5 BOOKS ON TURKEY: Turkey’s most-read author Elif Shafak picks Expat Harem among the best 5 books on Turkey (Five Books, November 2010)

+ THE ACCIDENTAL ANTHOLOGIST: expat+HAREM founder's personal story behind the book.

+ HAREM GIRLS FOR SALE: 2 years from workshop to bestseller list -- the story of two expat editors.

Editors interviewed on The Crossroads satellite TV, July 2009

+++++ Take the next step with us --> into GlobalNiche.net's creative self enterprise for the global soul.  Another good place to explore:  Anastasia Ashman's producer page at Facebook.

Defining Moments: Where We Begin And End In A Globalized Life

Change is in the air. This month we're redefining things we thought we knew. Where we begin and end. If democracy means we have to live with choices we wouldn't chose. The new social order of virtuality mixed with what many insist is "real life". And if we're signed up for life with a local -- no relocation services, no cost of living allowances -- are we even expats at all?

We're also taking a look at a clever new voice in the blogosphere and a weekend event in Holland meant to create breakthrough action in the lives of its international participants.

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Global businesswoman Rebecca Self wonders if her mobile career changes the pleasure of travel, or is it a fuller expression of her traveler nature?

In our second expat+HAREM interview, online psychotherapist and Internet media theorist Dr. Leon Tan challenges us with today's "digital diasporas" and the role of mixed reality -- a continuum of virtual to actual life experiences  -- in a globalized life.

A Third Culture Kid had a free-floating perception of herself, but now planted in one spot she's drawing personal borders. Meanwhile after 10-years abroad, a Brit realizes some expats are more equal than others. (Count us as expat type #2.)

Plus, a biculturalist (and 'Turklish' speaker) struggles to make sense of an emerging landscape: Tea Parties in her Missouri neighborhood, and turbans in Istanbul parks...

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In these sketchy, xenophobic times, our favorite new-smart-fresh blog by ex-expat/repat/neopat ML Awanohara starts giving awards to Americans unafraid of 'the other'.

We're charmed by the concept of Seen the Elephant, defined as a desire to seek out amazing sights in far corners of the world, a jaded expression of "been there, done that", and the famous Indian legend of six blind men feeling up a pachyderm.

And if you're a social entrepreneur or intrapreneur in Amsterdam mid-month, expat+HAREM poster Rebecca Self's European Summit for Global Transformation is *the* place to gather for "a weekend to change the world."

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Commenters about last month's burqa piece at National Review include: Zaharr Hayatti, who "detests the idea of a government which insists either TO veil or NOT to veil. This, I would pray, would/could be the woman's choice."

Arriving in Turkey 13 years ago, the ban on head scarves in government institutions seemed "rather primitive" to Kirsten Karahan, "reflecting prejudices against tradition, religion, economic class and gender." Now, the visual arts educator in Ankara says: "I have come to see that the practice contributes so heavily toward the general subjugation of women that it really must be kept out of public life. I don't have research to cite, but I do have personal observations and experiences."

And Catherine Bayar: "Cultures change from the inside, not by having change imposed upon them. It's not just the men who are the imposers of tradition cloaked in piety within the family."

As a global citizen, what are you in the midst of redefining?

Masterminding A Writer, Artist & Cultural Curator Platform

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group). Once a week someone steps into the center with a case study and asks for feedback and suggestions on their next steps. Here are my thoughts on building out a writing and artist platform:

I use Wordpress and Tumblr (simply as a feed of my blog, microblog and Delicious activities). It seems moving to Tumblr or Posterous might make things much simpler for you as a blogger-- they seem easy/breezy as blogging platforms -- whereas Wordpress's wider capabilities will encourage building a bigger site with more going on. So, since you're talking growth and not just 'make it easier' then I'd say Wordpress.

As for platform building, where are you meeting and engaging with potential readers of your novel (besides Twitter, SheWrites, Facebook, LI, your blog)? Any communities out there specific to the topics in your novel? Taking part in reader-based litchats on Twitter would be another way to start being known as the woman behind the voice that people will be able to read when your book comes out. (Consider posting small excerpts of the book so we know what it's about and grow connected to it?)

Maybe someone here can share leads to artists, writers, cultural curators that you are aware of online -- if you know of them, they're doing something right to get your attention.

As for making the hybrid nature of your work clearer through your platform, I'm reminded of the blog convention of another multifaceted woman: Ruth Harnisch.  She breaks down the different channels of her being and lets that be the structure of her site. "The Maker of Mistakes". "The Philanthropist". "The Catalyst". "The Recovering Journalist". Perhaps something like this might allow you to indulge your interests and help a visitor to your site/blog comprehend your better?

The expatharem site has sold books through its Amazon link -- in the first couple of years of the site. The #s since I relaunched the blog are too tiny to count for anything and that may be a result of the maturity of the book or the fact that I don't push it much on the site, and/or people aren't coming to the blog to buy the book or learn more about it. However, yes, making things available to our interested parties is part of making what we do a business. We have to make the offer. It's relevant. However, I also know being on twitter has sold books. People I met there, people who found out about the book on twitter (like during #litchat on expat lit).

Also: here's a great interview with a 'unmarketing' book author about how he built both a support system and a target audience on Twitter and presold 3,000 copies of his book. Good lessons there about how to engage and when to sell. 

In response to your question about using your own name as a brand, an SEO specialist I know from ThirdTribe (@CraigFifield) just offered an impromptu SEO consult on Twitter before the end of his workday/workweek. I took the liberty to ask him for an opinion on this, in general terms. Here’re the tweets (which overlap, as Twitter does)....

CF: i have 15min before I quit for the day -- how can I help you with SEO or your Blog?

AA: wd someone's name be a better blog name for SEO than tagline about art and the creative life?

CF: in terms of SEO I would use a keyword that people are searching for. Or, I would go for branding and ignore SEO

AA: that is, are proper names SEO at all? and generally used words and phrases amount to very little in SEO world?

AA: so in researching keywords "creative life" what result would prompt good use of that phrase in blog title?

CF: depends how your audience uses those words. I would do some keyword research to decide. do you have an example?

AA: ok think i got it! (branding with a proper name means SEO considerations unnecessary)

CF: well, unless your brand will eventually be big enough to be searched on :) make your brand name unique to win there

Cultural Style Memo With Rose Deniz

The artist and curator Rose Deniz posted on her blog about going to a wedding in Turkey and being the only one who seemed to have not gotten the style memo.

Being out of sync with one's surroundings is a typical experience for expats, multiculturalists, hybrids and global operators. So big news that this weekend I went to a Dutch-Turkish wedding this weekend in the Netherlands and was dressed like half the women there.

The Dutch women, not the Turks.

So, while the Turks tottered around on mossy and uneven patiobricks in their red-soled Louboutins, I was sensible and sporting in my motorcycle boots and wool wrap dress. Plus, walking around in Amsterdam the majority of the shops displayed outfits I'd wear and want to wear. That settles it.

As much as it's hard to keep the focus on a style that actually fits me when I'm surrounded by opposing cultural dress memos/messages, heeding what I truly want to wear is the only answer.

Finding it for sale locally is a different problem.

Masterminding A Grant-Writing Consulting Biz

Along with Tara Agacayak, I run a private mastermind group on LinkedIn (it’s a subgroup of my Creative Entrepreneurs & Social Media group).

Here are my thoughts from one of those sessions, on the topic of a grant-writing consulting biz:

If you were to create a blog to sell this skill I imagine you sharing resources, techniques, news about the grant writing process and opportunities. Examples and lessons drawn from your own experiences consulting others. Taking questions from your readers and addressing the answers in a post, all the while very clearly offering your consulting services -- more of the same high value understanding of the field, and personalized attention for the client -- at the end of each post, in the side bar. Offering a teleclass on the basics of grant writing. selling small ebooks with up-to-date resources and your guidance on various elements of grantwriting, and considerations for different sectors.

I bet you could knock out 20 topics you'd want to cover in a blog series, and that would get you very well started. try making a list of catchy headlines to peg the subject matter... "Grants, in this economy?!" "The secret of getting a grant" etc.

I'm not familiar with the territory but you might like to distinguish yourself from the other grant writing consultants out there -- so a bit of research to see what they're doing and how you might like to approach it differently. what you know/care about that they don't. personally, i'd love to see you bring a little of your personality to this business -- if it's at all possible. Who needs dry info when they can get a little zing with solid advice? It could be simply in the language you use to talk to your readers about what might be a dry subject.

I would love to learn more about grants *I* could get! Bet we all would. You could be the cool educator of your audience. How about targeting the audience you already have -- and help them find grants to do the work they love -- rather than splitting off to service a different group of people?

My Transmedia Wedding Project

....imagine “Meet the Parents” colliding with a grittier “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”! Transmedia ebook/screen adaptation of my Expat Harem wedding tale “Like An Ottoman Princess”, about bridging my radical West Coast family and traditional Near East in-laws at a palatial Istanbul wedding.

STORY EXCERPT Two families colliding. From different nations with textbook opposite cultures and traditions: An avant garde American family with a traditional Old World one. Secular Christians with secular Muslims. People from a famous anti-war community in the San Francisco Bay Area with a Turkish family steeped in military service and proud participation in NATO’s SHAPE, from a nation where the military is revered as the guardians of the republic. Bringing them together -- or is she keeping them apart? -- is a countercultural bride who may have arrived on this palatial doorstep through a lifetime of reinvention, but her past and her parents are somewhere else entirely.

More details to come about this and the counterculture family-themed prequel, THANKSGIVING WITH MARY JANE (featured on the homepage of the Red Room writing community, November 2010) and Chicken Soup for the Soul: All in the Family (2009).

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False Cosmopolitanism

We’re suffering from a false sense of cosmopolitanism. Access to the worldwide Interwebs leads us to imagine ourselves global thinkers. But we’re not -- unless we’re true xenophiles, bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds. Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.

“Xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual world, like this stumble into unfamiliar territory. Viewed through the lens of American civil politics, an American company's skin whitening product campaign on Facebook targeting Indians raised an anticolonialist uproar -- but not from the Indians. (No similar protests reported for popular self tanners that darken the skin.)

The launch of TEDWomen, a conference examining the effect of women and girls on the world’s future, created its own online culture shockwave. Are we all on the same page, North American feminists blogged here and here and here, wondering if a gathering separate from the main TED event to discuss the impact of womankind is brilliant or belittling. A blog sought a more nuanced perspective and tried the group replacement test, substituting one marginalized group for another. Imagine TEDGay. TEDMinority. TEDPoor.

Recently in a 10,000-person international network for women writers I found myself in an alternate online reality. An author asked the general community of “White people” (sic) to promote her new work, sight unseen besides a short synopsis, because booksellers relegate titles by black authors like her to a separate section and that negatively affects sales.

Her book substance-free promotion was at odds with how and why people share information and recommendations about books, even marginalized, discriminated against writers. Instead she let everyone know she “loves White people” and her “Spanish husband looks white on the street”.

A majority of the responses were “Sure, I’ll do that for you.” I expressed my confusion. Why was she talking to us like we were part of the problem? Why not normalize the work by taking it off the margins and offer to show it to those of us fellow writers who want to review it in our respective media and communities?

What a baffling corner of the Internet: a place where I'm addressed like a person who normally chooses reading material based on the author’s skin color  -- that would be dumbly racist, no? -- someone who today can be convinced to promote a title (to my Great White People Book Club) based on the original poster’s shelving problems at the bookstore and the-more-palatable-to-me skin tone of her husband glimpsed from afar.

Does it matter that there is definitively no such thing as a White people, or a Great White People Book Club, or that the motivation for word of mouth marketing requires a product to be “extremely helpful, interesting, unique, or valuable to a specific niche market”? Not in that particular microcosm, a place running on logic inherently foreign to me.

In this SheWrites universe I don’t even need to do a group replacement test (“Rich people”, “Powerful people”, “Beautiful people”) to know someone imagines it’s that easy to butter me up for their own purpose.

We may believe we’re global thinkers, and not be. But we’ve got other challenges. To be a global thinker demands we navigate and find a way to bridge worlds that might make only a sinister kind of sense.

As a xenophile, where online do you stumble?

Supraculture: Transcending The World’s Subcultures

So much fun this month name-calling and finding our true neighborhood in supraculture. Dropping hints for your soundtrack of placelessness. Announcing the emergence of a great new voice with whom we're exploring the existential anxiety of being people like us.

Lots of things to do: besides sharing your thoughts on tipping points and tour groups, you're invited to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime creative project on 11/11/11 with people from 196 countries, in 2,000 languages. It promises to be "the greatest story ever told."

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

Let us know what you'd ask the expat+HAREM community.

We asked for the names you give our global nichery --

is it a subculture like nudists and skateboarders and Burning Man (which sound like the same thing, snarf!), or is this diverse life we lead a transcendent supraculture above and beyond it all?

Some replies (keep them coming): Homeless. Geoagnostic. Nomadology.

"Worldburgers is what I call people like us," offers Judith van Praag, a Dutch writer/designer in Seattle and a Dialogue2010 cultural innovator.

+++++ AT expat+HAREM

This month we discussed the tipping point of cultural assimilation and its confusions (can a soapy television show trigger a shift in your identity?). We also confided what the ancient history of a place has made us do (like fall down a Turkish mountain when the past won't meet us in a more convenient spot, or innovate new business based on heritage techniques). Being contradictory types, we continue to debate whether our travel styles -- ultraspecialized tour group, herdlike mass transport, or loner on a new landscape -- reflect larger life choices or simply what it takes to get us somewhere else on the planet.

Our Facebook page wall is a perfect place to highlight your latest identity adventure: friends and fans are invited to post your blog/site link, and tell us all what awesomeness you've been up to.

+++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

We're not alone. In fact, here's another vote for supraculture: we're thrilled to witness a like-minded movement building online in the inaugural hybridology conference call by Amna Ahmad of The Pragmatic Hybrid. Addressing "the existential anxiety of our hybrid lives," she says we're looking for models of courage/integrity in smart/fascinating people "who do eleven things that don't seem to have anything in common." Sound familiar?

Good guide to creating an earthy soundscape: the world music reviews at Perceptive Travel, the online magazine by book authors on the move. Personally, they had us at "remixed desert blues" Tuareg-style, and "placeless internationalism".

Among the luminaries we met at TEDGlobal last month: the founder of 11ElevenProject, a day-long time capsule which aims to be the biggest creative project in human history -- bringing the world together through film, photography, art, sound and music -- to celebrate our individuality, and honor our common humanity. Plan to participate.

Everywhere Is Exotic Or Nowhere Is

At the opening of TED University, a pre-event of TEDGlobal 2010 in Oxford, England, TED Curator June Cohen emceed. During a technical difficulty, she filled the time on stage by asking us in the live audience of 600 gathered from around the world, "Who came the farthest to get here?"

A few people shouted out locations. Kenya. India. Los Angeles.

Cohen repeated into the microphone each place. When she said Los Angeles, she deflected it as a possible winner for farthest by saying, "LA isn't exotic."

But that wasn't the question she put to us. And --

Exotic is relative. The only way it belongs in a global mindset is as a constant for everyone. So, either everywhere is exotic -- or nowhere is. We are all exotic, or no one is.

For me, the moment highlighted an ingrained provincialism at a supposedly global conference dedicated to "pushing the boundaries of what is known and expanding the possible."

The idea of what global means is still badly under-developed, and like this instance, too often freighted with the most self-centric assumptions.

Spot That Paradox: Open-Minded Misapprehensions And Other Global Values

Phew, just under the wire -- or there'd be no such thing as the May newsletter. Still tweaking what's to come. This first issue we're pleased to feature a reader query, some of the latest content on the site, a new experiential magazine for culturati, and a special offer for entrepreneurs who want to ramp up their professionalism on the world's widest web.

+++++ YOUR THOUGHTS

A reader in California sent us this question: What are global values?

Tricky! ...if they exist, they'd be the binds of a global community. Let us know how you'd answer him.

+++++ AT expat+HAREM

This discussion about Russian customer service and its complex roots in culture, politics and religion shows it's difficult to agree on something that seems pretty basic: how to treat another human being during a transaction.

+++++ AROUND THE WORLD & AROUND THE WEB

In a recent issue of AFAR, a brand new experiential travel magazine "for Americans who aren't part of the close-minded crowd", two articles admit some open-minded misapprehensions. One writer thinks the Inuit in Canada's High Arctic will be as worried as San Franciscans are about global warming, while another discovers 20 years of trying to fix a Filipino rice-farmer's life has only changed the comfort level of his own privileged birthright.

+++++ SPECIAL OFFER: [expired] Zero to Sixty While Keepin' It Real

JOIN THIRD TRIBE The web's a natural place for global citizens like us to test and actualize our ideas, build community, and even create an unbounded livelihood.

Are you looking for a way to raise the professional level of your online presence? Third Tribe has been getting our online derriere into gear since it opened three months ago. Our newsletter wouldn't have been born this decade if it weren't for a Third Tribe seminar telling us exactly how to do it, and why it's important. (They'd be freaked to hear I'm sending it out during a long holiday weekend. See, lots to learn.)

Bornean Buddha: A Mindful Horror Story

According to the Tibetans, May 27 is Buddha’s birthday. A prince with everything in the world, he set off on a quest to discover the truth of life. I’m remembering a mindfulness adventure I had, fifteen years ago on that day. In Borneo, I felt bored and restless at a luxe, manicured Shangri-La resort favored by fugitive rogue traders. Wandering past the watersports shack I asked to go to an outlying island in the South China Sea. No notice to the people I was traveling with, no drinking water, food or cellphone.

The white-uniformed sailor dropped me at the random spot I’d picked from his laminated map. A decrepit picnic bench sagged in the shade of a steep cliff carpeted in greenery, where faceless monkeys screeched. No facilities, no stand selling lunch, no people. Just plastic flotsam and slithery tracks lacing the sand. The hotel boat fishtailed away.

Did they write down where they left me? Lawsuit waiting to happen. Already thirsty. Wait, six-inch wide tracks. From what scaly beasts?

No way I'd approach the trees where those squiggly trails led. I was frying in the tropical sun. Unnerved to cool off in the translucent green water. What if I suddenly 'had trouble' swimming, or a shark came? Maybe I could flag down a passing boat to take me back. But these were pirate-infested waters.

Silly overreaching hotel guest, I was going to die on this wild island.

I picked up a 5-liter water jug and started filling it with cones and olive shells glinting among seaweed and garbage. Good stuff. My best vacations were spent shell-collecting in the Gulf of Mexico...Sanibel Island in Florida.

Heavenly new finds here. A true Shangri-La paradise. Zebra-striped scallops. Glossy limpets. Spiky orange coral.

That day as I ringed the tiny island -- is that a chickpea cowrie? – I turned the corner on my own nature’s bitter edge.

On this birthday week of Buddha can you name a mindfulness experience you’ve had?

Authority Abroad: What It Takes To Become Your Own Expat Icon

I've always admired the rugged ability of certain adventurer-writers to appear masterful in the wider world. True or not, it’s easy to envision legendary expatriate authors like Karen Blixen and Ernest Hemingway crushing it in their overseas exploits. Satisfying wanderlust. Surviving exotic illness. Operating transnational businesses. Donning local garb or exploration gear. Pictured alone on the landscape, or comfortably surrounded by teeming locals. Iconic.

Then they write personally relevant opuses Out of Africa and The Old Man and the Sea.

Larger-than-life expat writer personalities seem in tune with far-flung surroundings, able to produce their best work from foreign atmospheres.

These two predecessors were clearly troubled. Alcoholism. Venereal disease. Financial ruin. Divorce. Suicide. However, aspiring to their ultimate of travel feats -- achieving a personal and professional high point -- remains an urge for writers abroad like me.

I explore my own brush with the weight of expat image expectation at a colleague's blog this week by delving into the photos that correspond with a highlight and a lowlight of my expat experience. Despite previous and future international depths, it only takes one flashbulb moment to remind us we too can outdo ourselves abroad. And that memory can empower us and our expat life for a long time. Take a peek at Unrecognizable vs. Iconic.

Which expat icons do you admire -- and when have you found authority overseas?

Psychic Solution To Your Global Identity Crisis

Glo· bal· niche, n. psychic solution to your global identity crisis

Don't coin too many terms, warn the smart search engine optimizers. "No one will know what you're talking about plus they won't be able to find you!" At expat+HAREM we like to talk about unconventional, unbounded and unmapped life as we experience it, and if we could find the lingo we need in common usage, we'd certainly use it.

(Tell us the terms you use.)

On Twitter someone asked, “is ‘hybrid life’ kinda like what a salamander leads?” Uh, sure...you could call us cultural amphibians. Water, air, land, we (try to) do it all.

If you've arrived in the expat+HAREM community, perhaps you do know what I'm talking about. Or maybe you want to see what's next in neoculture (another coined term to-be-explained).

Here’s the deal.

WE'RE ALL BORN GLOBAL CITIZENS even if that knowledge gets trained out of us. A global identity seems nebulous, and ungrounded. Better to bond with the more concrete: family, culture, nation.

Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

Globalization means we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo about who we are and where we belong in the world.

Mixed blood. Crossculture. Third Culture. International work, study, travel. Fusion faiths, dual nationalities. Many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one.

The more we move around the less home is one place --  not to mention the mirage home becomes as soon as we leave it -- so our associations spread and bifurcate and split again. Our capacity for inclusion grows, and our sense of self expands along with it.

Coming, going, never quite arriving. This is where we live today. We’re searching for our place in the world, our people, the hybrid lifestyle that will make it all cohese. We know this:

Our concrete center will not hold.

OUR PEOPLE ARE NOT WHO THEY USED TO BE We also recognize we’re unbounded by the communities in our physical midst and traditional markers like geography, nationality or even blood.

Now we find inspiring new kinship in interest and outlook.

Virtual technologies like social media and mobile devices help identity adventurers, global nomads and digital citizens integrate even faster across out-moded boundaries.

• We’re segregating along the lines of our true selves. Joining tribes. Ning networks. Realtime Twitter chats.
• Finding ways not to be limited by where we are, and methods to be who we are, doing what we love, regardless of location.
• In the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of actual social circumstance -- we  demand more value and relevance from our connections. They demand the same of us, filling our interactions with dynamism and serendipity.

To become the global citizens we truly are, we need to find our place in the world.

This has always been the case. But the 21st century offers new ways to find where we uniquely belong, and a new urgency to actualize our global citizenship.

Here at expat+HAREM we believe you can create a psychic solution to your global identity crisis.

Call it psychic location independence.

She'sNext interview: Here I'm talking about how multifaceted, 21st century women can find their global niche.

TAPPING INTO OUR OWN GLOBAL BEING When we discover our psychic peers and foster a global community with them  -- fashioning a hybrid identity and a 'salamander' life that intersects and honors the many worlds we belong to -- we've found our global niche. It's good to be home.