Category: Clients Crushin’ It

Doris Buffett, sister of Warren, and megaphilanthropist in her own right, passed away peacefully last month at her home in Rockport, Maine.

I never met Doris. But if it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have been commissioned by one of her foundations to write Letters to Doris: One Woman’s Quest to Help Those with Nowhere Else to Turn.

I wouldn’t have been blessed by the creative synergy with my co-writer, Anita Mumm, and our photographer, Stephanie Craig. I would never have met Amy Kingman, the boss you want to have on a project that involves traveling across 19 states for the better part of a year.

If it weren’t for Doris, I would never experienced such heart-breaking, in the sense of heart-opening, interviews with her grant recipients. I would never have met Ken Prather in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who asked for funding so he could take terminally ill children to the zoo in a reliable vehicle. A man who was getting by himself on a tiny monthly disability check had started his own foundation.

I would never have known there were English Labs capable of detecting when a human’s blood sugar level dropped to dangerous levels, until I met one in Rockwell City, Iowa, along with her new owner, Kalie Buenting, a 12-year-old brittle diabetic. Bringing the two of them together was another of Doris’s good deeds.

I never met Doris, but I met her spirit in each of the two dozen individuals we interviewed for the book—and there were hundreds and hundreds more we could have spoken to. This is what great people do. It isn’t about meeting them; it’s about getting to know each other, about getting together to help each other through this life. That is why, when a great person dies their essence remains here more than anything is gone.

You can read Doris’s obituary in the New York Times here. And if you were lucky enough to meet Doris, you can leave a story, memory, or message on this site, which will eventually become part of a virtual celebration of Doris’s life.

There are people who rush their books to market. They might have other things they want to write, or they might just be trying to say something and not care that much about the delivery. (They might also be lazy, but we would never say that here.) Julie Matheson’s gorgeous book, Lotus Flower Living: A Journaling Practice for Deep Discovery and Lasting Peace, on the other hand, has been almost a decade in the making. And the care and clarity it radiates show every single one of those years.

Simply put, Julie’s work helps us clear patterns. (If you want to hear about it in her own words, watch this brief introduction.) She first helps us identify a specific pattern of thought, behavior, and belief, some of which can be delicate and quite painful. We all have sensitive spots that we protect, compensate for, and cope with. When we endeavor to identify an ongoing issue, however, and put a little time into discovering exactly what we are protecting, a miracle happens.

About Book Architecture, Julie says, “Thank you for appreciating the purpose of this book, for holding my vision while you so gently and expertly coached this material out of me. . . . And, bravely, you were the first to ‘test’ the writing prompts. Without your amazingly intuitive writing methods, this book would not exist.”

We did try out the prompts. And it didn’t take too much more coaxing once we saw how well they worked. We caught fire instead. Come on, you know you have at least half a dozen blank journals that people have given you because you’re a writer. Grab Julie’s book, and you’ll be guaranteed to have something real to fill them with.

It is certainly tempting to retreat into the fear that our democratic institutions are failing us. But as wintry as these political times are, there are always signs of a spring of cooperation. And, as with most such things, they usually occur on the local level first.

In Hope for Democracy: How Citizens Can Bring Reason Back into Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020), by our clients John Gastil and Katie Knobloch, the authors introduce new tools for tamping down hyperpartisanship and placing citizens at the heart of the democratic process.

They showcase the Citizens’ Initiative Review, which convenes a demographically balanced, random sample of citizens to study statewide ballot measures. These regular ol’ citizens are the ones to ask questions of advocates, opponents, and experts and then write an analysis that distills their findings for voters.

John and Katie reveal how this process has helped voters better understand the policy issues on their ballots. In the larger context of deliberative democratic reforms, Hope for Democracy shows how citizens and public officials can work together to bring more rationality and empathy into modern politics. Are we ready for that? Will we be soon?

Remembering an afternoon spent in John’s office on the Penn State campus, where he holds a joint appointment as professor of communication arts & sciences and professor of political science, I can report that when you are around him and Katie, you can imagine a better, saner world to come.

About Book Architecture, the authors say, “A whole host of individuals have provided editorial feedback . . . most notably, Stuart Horwitz, who helped us think through the narrative arc of this book and shepherded us through the task of writing for a nonacademic audience.”

One of the things we all have to face is how divided our country is. A common observation, perhaps. But when we dig into just how divided it is, and along what fault lines, the situation gets more and more disturbing. You can read about my personal experience with this topic here (Instagram) or here (Facebook).

To help clear away our collective stupor, along comes one of our clients, Christina Proenza-Coles, with a dose of reality to administer. In her book, American Founders, a 2019 Foreword INDIES finalist, Christina reminds us that whiteness is a myth that was invented to rationalize New World slavery and that obscures the seminal contributions of four centuries of men and women of African descent. Synthesizing massive amounts of scholarship, she details these people who were key protagonists in the story of American democracy: defending New World settlements, undermining slavery, and championing freedom throughout the hemisphere.

Our conventional founding narratives fail to recognize that Africans and their descendants preceded the English in the Americas by a century and arrived in numbers that far exceeded those of European migrants. African-descended people contributed to every facet of American history as explorers, conquistadors, settlers, soldiers, sailors, servants, slaves, rebels, leaders, lawyers, litigants, laborers, artisans, artists, activists, translators, teachers, doctors, nurses, inventors, investors, merchants, mathematicians, scientists, scholars, engineers, entrepreneurs, generals, cowboys, pirates, professors, politicians, priests, poets, and presidents.

In other words, multiculturalism is not politically correct; it’s historically accurate. American history and African American history are fundamentally intertwined.

About Book Architecture, Christina says, “American Founders was a labor of love, decades of research, and a lifetime of questions, but the first draft read like an encyclopedia with a somewhat ranting introduction and a rambling conclusion. Book Architecture was therapy for my book. Stuart refused to let me settle for an academic compendium of facts and continually challenged me to explain why these facts are meaningful. Because I trusted Stuart, I could answer his thoughtful prompts with honesty and finally—yes, I’m going to use the cliché—find my voice. If you don’t believe me, check out this clip of Wynton Marsalis reading from American Founders, which he selected as one of his top ten ‘compelling works on the subject of freedom.’”