Jennifer Howard

I hit an unexpected and unwelcome writing hiatus this past month when my netbook stopped working. I want to say that the netbook died or that it decided to quit on me, but that would be giving it a life and a sense of being that it doesn’t deserve, much as I loved it. (And I did love it.) And even saying that a machine doesn’t deserve something anthropomorphizes it. It’s hard to resist the pull to see one’s writing implements as collaborators. Writing gets very tangled up for me with the mechanics by which it’s accomplished. There’s a practical… Read more...

According to the New York times, it’s fashionable to hate the phone (“Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” by Pamela Paul, NYT, March 28, 2011). I appreciate some of the anti-phone arguments. If a telemarketer rings you up at the dinner hour , it tends not to improve the evening. If you work as a journalist, you will be the recipient of long, long voicemail messages from flaks who want to follow up the three emails they sent following up on the long, long voicemail message they left last week. That’s pesty, as Eric Carle might say. And I… Read more...

Welcome to 2011. A lot of people I know were happy to see the back of 2010. I know how they feel; I finished the year with what my doc called a “humdinger” of a case of pneumonia, which put me in the hospital for 4 days right after Thanksgiving and wiped me out for the holidays. Writing helped get me through it; I live-tweeted my way through the worst of it and worked on a story (“Cutting-Edge Imaging Helps Scholars Reveal Rare 8th-Century Manuscript”) from my hospital bed. If live-tweeting a case of pneumonia sounds a little…odd, consider this…. Read more...

There’s a stack of publishers’ catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family’s digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures—and my kids are only in elementary school. You don’t want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk at home, waiting for me to sort through and file or (more likely) recycle them. I have far more ideas for stories, fiction and non, than I’ve made time for yet. The list goes on. Welcome to my personal version of hyperabundance. It’s been a… Read more...

Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things—personal, financial, global—occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for—catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published. Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there’s always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference. The… Read more...

At the 2009 WebWise Conference on Museums and Libraries in the Digital Age, held here in D.C. last week, I collected a new term: switch-tasking. Definition? Instead of doing a number of things all at once—multitasking—you rotate among tasks. I haven’t figured out yet whether the difference is more semantic than substantive, but it’s worth thinking about. The conference itself was fascinating, as much for the anthropology of it as for the substance. Here’s part of the report I posted to the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog: If you’re used to the decorum of a big academic conference—the Modern Language Association’s… Read more...