Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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A Tale of Two Paintings

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I’ve talked about how an exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in Dancing Prince. In turn, two paintings in the exhibition play a critical role in the narrative of the novel. 

Jason Kent-Hughes, the adopted son of Michael and Sarah, is working as an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. Sarah describes him as their “San Francisco street child with a gift for painting and art administration.” After graduating from school in London, he did a year of military and then enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of University College London. After receiving his degree, he joined the Tate Modern.

As he explains to Michael, he gave a talk at the museum about the paintings done by Sarah that are in the Tate’s collection. It’s part of a regular weekly feature, he says, in which a staff member speaks about their choice of topic – something they’re working on, something in the collection, an upcoming exhibition, a research project, and so on. 

The lectures are open to the public and generally draw anywhere from 30 to 300 people, apart from the staff attending. Jason’s talk on Sarah’s paintings brings 2,000, forcing the museum to move the event to Power Hall (the Tate Modern’s huge interior space). It’s also videotaped and posted for sale on the museum’s web site, resulting in 30,000 orders during the first day. The museum suspects there’s a huge financial and artistic potential here, and it asks Jason to curate a major exhibition of Sarah’s work. Assembling the exhibition becomes his full-time job for the next 18 months.

Jason uses a journal of works kept by Sarah, starting with the paintings she did for her senior university project (described in Dancing Priest). Through some fairly intense work, he’s able to track 99 of her 101 listed paintings. The two that he can’t locate are the last ones, and they’re described in the journal with rather puzzling letters. What he knows is that these two paintings are likely important, because Sarah had been evolving her style and clearly reaching for something more.

Jim Kent-Hughes, the other adopted son of Michael and Sarah, accidentally comes across painting #100. It is their youngest child, Tommy, who holds the key to painting #101. All of Sarah’s paintings, and even her studio, become flashpoints in the relationship between Michael and Tommy. But those two paintings will be the most serious tension points. 

I’d like to say I understood exactly what I was doing when I developed the story of the two paintings. Perhaps I did, subconsciously. But it was only after the book was published, and I had reread it (twice), that I realized the story of the two paintings are the bookends for the entire series of five novels. Sarah’s paintings and art play an important role in the first book, Dancing Priest. And they play a critical role in the final book, Dancing Prince.

The story of the two paintings also speaks to something else – the meaning of art in our lives. We can look at a painting say “I like it” or “I don’t like it” or “They call that art? I could have painted that.” Or we can be so struck by a painting that words fail us. The first time that happened to me was in London, and (surprise) it was at the Tate Modern. It was a portrait of Marguerite Kelsey by Meredith Frampton. That one painting brought me back three times to the museum during a 2012 visit, and I still don’t know if I can adequately describe the impression it made on me. Another annual exhibition in London that we’ve seen all five times we’ve visited is the BP Portrait Awards, which has a similar effect on me. 

In Dancing Prince, those last two paintings will affect virtually every character who sees them in a very similar way that those paintings in London affected me. For Michael and Tommy, the impact will be far greater. 

Top photograph by Abbie Bernet, and middle photograph by Zalfa Imani, via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Dancing Prince: Anticipating a DNA Study of Vikings?

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Some strange things have occasionally happened with the Dancing Priest stories. Strange, as in they anticipated some real news events. Each of the novels has an example of this, to the point where it spooked my wife and even my publisher.

And now comes Dancing Prince, published in July of this year. 

In mid-September, scientists in Denmark and Armenia published a study in Nature that reported on the largest DNA study of Vikings ever done. The Vikings, as it turns out, were a far more diverse lot that anyone had previously known. Yes, a preponderance of the DNA was associated with the Nordic countries like Sweden and Denmark, but the researchers also found that the Vikings were not a homogenous group. The DNA included connections to southern Europe and Asia.

The Popular science site Inverse, in its story on the study, noted that some of the Pictish people of Ireland and Scotland had burials like Vikings. 

When I wrote and finished the text of Dancing Prince, I was completely unaware of this research. The investigation of a burial site on a small (and fictitious) island in the Orkneys uncovers the burial of a Viking and a Celt, a male and female and presumably a married couple. DNA analysis of the two people found in the tomb confirms a hypothesis by the lead character in the novel. The novel also includes a novella as an epilogue that tells the story of this couple, and it tracks fairly closely with what the research team learned about Vikings and their DNA. 

I did a lot of reading – a lot of reading – about Vikings, their invasions of the British Isles, their homelands, their burial customs, their lifestyles, and the names of people that were common. I checked to see if it was possible to do DNA analyses of skeletons or human remains more than a thousand years old (it is). I studied reports by archaeologists working on Viking sites. I read about Viking marriage rites. 

In doing all this research, my goal wasn’t to create an absolutely perfect story, but to create a plausible one. 

What I didn’t expect was to anticipate (by two-and-a-half months) a study on Vikings’ DNA that, even if unintentionally, gives my fictional story more credence. 

Top photograph by Steinar Engeland via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poet Blogs the Layoff

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Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

My first thought was a selfish one: would I be drawing a target on my back? My answer was, maybe. I’d certainly be drawing attention, but that could also work another way: “He helped people understand the layoff, so they got rid of him.” That wouldn’t bode well for trust in the company’s management. I talked to a few people, including my boss. The poet in me won out, and I decided to do it. 

I drafted three posts: what happened to me when I had been laid off; what kinds of questions did I get from colleagues, friends, and family; and what happened once when a close friend and colleague was laid off and I wasn’t. 

Poetry at Work

This was a big deal inside the company. It had never been done before, and HR was nervous. The lawyers wanted to approve every word, and I refused on the grounds that it had nothing to do with what was happening and going to happen, but instead talked about what happened to one person (me) at another company. 

The first post was published. The first day, more than 10 percent of the employee population read it. It had set a record for the company’s internal blog. The next two drew even bigger numbers. In the communications void before the actual storm, I told people what they could expect, what they should know, and how they should treat fellow employees who would be laid off.

I had people I’d never met come to my office to thank me. I had countless phone calls and email. A switchboard operator called to determine where to direct a news media inquiry, and she thanked me for my posts. I heard that many people printed them and brought them home to their families. (The company invariable forgets about the family, who will be as much affected by a layoff as the employee.) And the company received kudos for allowing the posts to be published.

The posts weren’t easy to write. My own experiences were still painful; you don’t forget these kinds of situations. But you do what a poet does – and take an event or experience and turn it into something universal, something that help people see the experience in a different if personal light. 

I still consider those three posts to be among some of the very best work I ever did.

From Poetry at Work: “A close friend at work learned he was losing his job. We met in the corporate cafeteria the next day. He walked over to me, lunch tray in his hands, and stood there. ‘Are you sure you want to be seen with me?’ he asked. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. His entire department had stopped speaking to him. He had to stay in the office for the next 45 days while being shunned. I was stunned. So, I did the only thing I knew to do. I stood and hugged him. He cried. What a scene that made, right there in the cafeteria.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Matt Noble via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Best Job You Ever Had

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It started with a phone call from a friend. “Did you see the job ad in the paper?” he said.

“What job ad?” I said.

“The city school district is looking for a communications director. You’d be perfect.”

“Do you hate me or something?” I said.

The city school district was indeed looking for a communications director. The district was in organizational chaos. A reform school board had brought in a management consultant firm from New York to reorganize the district. Schools had been closed. Central office staff had been laid off – some 800 people. Management of cafeterias, school buses, and other services was being outsourced. The management firm was doing what had to be done, but the district was so strangled by its own politics and so intertwined with city politics that it was impossible to try to make the changes from within. 

To give some scope to the problem: the district was staffed and resourced for 100,000 students. Officially, something slightly less than 40,000 attended. The real number was closer to 30,000. The day the management firm arrived, it was learned that the district was so in spending deficit that bankruptcy might be required.

And this was the organization I would be perfect for? Not to mention the ongoing issues, problems, and violence associated with virtually all urban school districts?

I ended up applying for the job. I ended up getting the job. It was the best job I’d ever had. It was also the worst. I was living the opening of A Tale of Two Cities.

It was performance poetry. It was improv poetry. It was epic and it was free verse. Everyone knew exactly how communications had to be run. 

I received daily phone calls from the mayor’s office, giving me instructions on what I was supposed to do each day. I ignored them, every single time. 

Poetry at Work

I learned about police radios and how the news media used them to track district news, like when a school board member threw a pitcher of water on a district official because she had seen The Wizard of Oz and knew that water melted witches. 

School board members leaked each other’s emails. 

My budget – which the previous year had been $1 million with a staff of 12 – had been cut to $20,000 and a staff of 1/2, and the budget had already been spent before I arrived. I had to invent communications out of whole cloth, with no money. 

There was never a work day without multiple crises. The work followed me home at night and on weekends – I once did a television interview on a Saturday outside the car dealership where my car was being serviced. I did another one in my family room. I did interviews at schools, meetings, on sidewalks, at lunches, in hallways. I was on television so much that a crazy anomaly developed: an aging, white male Baby Boomer became the public face of an urban school district. 

I was there almost nine months, the most tumultuous nine months of the district’s history, my career, and even my own life. I left because I could sense I was burning out; no one could handle communications in constant chaos. 

I did get to see and experience the best and worst of human behavior – and sometimes from the same people. I was personally tested for what I could handle, and I knew I had not been found wanting. I loved and hated that job, and I would never do it again. But I was thankful that I’d done it. 

From Poetry at Work:

First day on the job 

It’s only 9 a.m.
Channel 5 is waiting, cameras
filming in expectation
of a statement, any statement,
it doesn’t matter what it says;
school board members 
are leaking emails on each other,
the teacher on the phone 
is correcting my pronunciation;
the newspaper uses police radios
to follow the school district news
while the consultant is calling
about “a better brand for the schools”;
the parents protest is scheduled
for 5:30; the mayor’s office
is sending PR instructions
and I’m told the teachers have 
a sick-out today because they
can’t bank sick days anymore
and it’s only 9 a.m. and 
my first day on the job. I’m
going to love this place.

Top photograph by Mesh via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of the Crisis

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There’s nothing like a good crisis to demonstrate how little control an organization has. There’s also nothing like a good crisis to uncover the poetry in our souls.

A product cancellation was looming, the cancellation to be imposed by a government agency. Thousands of jobs were at stake, not to mention income, corporate stock price, reputation, and significant disruptions for customers. The crisis had been coming for nearly a year, contained within official communications between the government and the company.

As time passed, internal anxiety grew. In the communications area, we were a relatively minor player, except for the moment at which the crisis would go public. Then we would occupy the most important position in the overall situation. Blow it there, and the product would be destroyed in the marketplace.

What ultimately led to a successful resolution was a recognition that the government’s concerns had to be addressed. That moved the company from a “scorched earth and fight them everywhere” approach to “what can we do and offer to resolve those concerns.” The company, and the people responsible for overall management of the issue, reached deep into their souls, and developed what turned out to be a significant innovation in product management.

Poetry at Work

One of the top business managers believed the whole thing was a crock – that the government would never cancel the product. And he really didn’t like the communications plan, and the resources that had to be put into place to pull off what would amount to an internal revolution. He didn’t actively try to stop anything, but he made his opinion known far and wide in the organization, including that “no one would care except trade press.” That made our work a lot more difficult. 

The government accepted the company’s plan for the product. The news went public two days before Thanksgiving. It was a tidal wave of media interest. We had done well to prepare for an onslaught, and even then, it wasn’t enough. I lived on the phone with news media calls for the next two days – 12- and 14-hour days of saying the same things over and over. I was never more thankful for Thanksgiving, bit as soon as it was over, the phone calls resumed. Media interest finally calmed but continued for weeks. It was a very fine line that had to be walked – acknowledge the government’s concern as legitimate and simultaneously defend the product’s safety. 

Some weeks later, I was attending a dinner that was part of a training session for salespeople in a small town in Iowa. Some 250 of our sales representatives were in the audience, and the business manager who had been the chief naysayer was the dinner speaker. I didn’t know what he was going to say, but I was a wee bit apprehensive that the naysaying would continue.

It didn’t. What he said was this: “From the beginning, I believed this was a tempest in a teapot, that we were exaggerating things all out of proportion. I was wrong. I can tell you tonight that all that stood between us and disaster was a tiny handful of PR people. And they pulled it off.” I was the only PR person from the team at the dinner, and every face in the room turned to me.

A crisis had forced the organization to pull the poetry from its soul. It was literally an act of saving grace.

From Poetry at Work: “Crises are the poetry of surprise, upset, and human frailty. They are often the poetry of organizational change, the poetry of the disruption of the status quo. They can speak powerfully to an organization’s managers and people, and they can also fall of deaf ears. Crises expose our humanity, both flawed and good; our limitations and potential reach; our courage, and our fears. And they do all of these things simultaneously.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Ante Hamersmit via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Speechwriting

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The most solitary job in corporate America is not the position of CEO. It’s the position of the CEO’s speechwriter. It can be the loneliest job as well.

I spent about two thirds of my career in speechwriting. Forty years ago, no one aspired to be a corporate speechwriter. You would find people who wanted to be presidential or political speechwriters, but most people who ended up in corporate speechwriting did so by accident. In my own case, I was 25 years old and assigned to a huge issue threatening to disrupt the company. The executive in charge of marketing needed a speech on the topic. The regular speechwriters are unavailable, so I was asked to do it. My strength was, in this case, knowing the subject matter. I had written speeches for myself; I had taken a course in American speeches in college. But I hadn’t written for someone else. 

The speech went well. After the speech, the executive said, “I thought the audience was going to be jumping up and down on the tables. They told me that no one had explained how an issue in Washington, D.C. affected them and their businesses before, at least in language that made sense.” From that point on, he wanted no one else to write his speeches. I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group. 

Later, I was hired by another company to do general PR work, not speeches. But the VP for my division was unexpectedly put on the speaking circuit by the CEO. No one else in our group had experience in speechwriting. My career was becoming known as “speechwriter by accident;” it wasn’t long before I was moved to the corporate speechwriting group. The same circumstances repeated themselves for my next two jobs, until I was put in charge of corporate speechwriting.

Poetry at Work Poetry of the Workspace

Most communications people don’t like speechwriting, and it’s no surprise. Someone else always gets the credit for your work, unless it goes badly; then it’s your fault. You often find yourself dealing with temperamental CEOs and occasionally being yelled at. The hard work of writing a speech never happens in teams. What happens in teams is various vested interests wanting control or wanting to insert a favored program or idea. You don’t win popularity contests by refusing to cite someone’s pet project. It takes a long time, but eventually, if you’re good at what you do, people come to respect and rely on your judgment. Usually.

A speech is unlike any other kind of communication. It’s created on paper or on a screen, to be read or referred to, for people to hear it and understand it. You write for the eye to be read by the voice to be heard by the ear. It’s tricky.

I attended a number of speechwriting seminars and workshops, but nothing helped me like reading and reciting poetry. The best speeches have a quality of poetry about them – the rhythm, the cadence, the pace, the ideas coming at you in orderly but unusual ways. I relied heavily on three modernist poets – T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Dylan Thomas. They were my guides and mentors. When I had trouble with writing, I turned to Four Quartets or “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”

I started writing key sections of speeches – the critical emotional parts – by hand, and often in free verse form. The best-known speech I ever wrote was first written almost entirely in free verse form. It helped make the executive famous and turned an industry on its head. Seven years after it was first given, four years after the executive had retired, requests for copies of the speech were still being received by the company. That’s unheard of in most speechwriting circles, including political; it remains unique in corporate circles.

And it was poetry that infused that work.

From Poetry at Work: “Speechwriting is a solitary profession, devoted largely to reading, writing, search, and study. It may be the closest thing we have today to the monastic life outside the monastery, except that at critical stages, the whole world seems to step in. Speechwriting requires ongoing interaction with executives, content experts, librarians, academics, PR people, attorneys, outside consultants, and even other speechwriters. To do it well, the speechwriter must manage all of those people and not let them get in the way of what the executive has to say.”

This article was prepared for the Literary Life Book of the Month discussion group on Facebook.

Top photograph by Alem Omerovic via Unsplash. Used with permission.