There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Writing and Resume-ing, not to mention Chopping Wood

Spent the day doing little things. I took a walk and paid bills around town (good news, we finally got the new checks). Then I chopped wood for a couple of hours. This time I ran into plenty of difficult wood (knots, internal branches, crooked grain, etc).

And then I finished up a poem for the 15th Annual Nature Writers. See, I sent a bunch of poems off to the Akron Art Museum New Voices Poetry Contest, and I forgot to write down which poems I sent. Bad writer, no cookie. Also, there's a good chance of a job at the Geauga Park District which requires writing skills (doing research on the district was how I found the poetry contest). As you know, Bob, much of my poetry involves nature themes, so it seemed like a fit. Also, at least in my little head, I'm looking at it as a part of my audition for the job. Now, I would have liked to get 800 words of prose out (as that would be more germane to the job), but got all twisted around and went for the poem instead. The new poem is entitled "The Woods in Winter" and has a bunch of nice phrasing, including hibernating bare trees and an allusion to the Wizard of Oz. I debating about expanding the poem into a prose piece (ayk,B, I do prose poetry as well), but I didn't know how the judges would take that (not everybody likes that sort of thing).

There was another job offering that was posted, so I did a quick rewrite of the resume from all the notes I had from yesterday, and sent it out. So we'll see how the "cleaned up" version works. I'd much rather 1) have my old job or 2) get the parks job, but it's a job I could do well, and there would be some travel (I haven't done that since E&Y). So I'd take it. Off went the resume (and copies to the people I had give me a critique of it).

So here's a question about resumes. One of the suggestions was to jazz it up and do a full design job on the resume (add graphics, make it fold into something, look like a newspaper, whatever). Now, typically I've dismissed those urges to make the resume scan quicker (and for automated tools), make it nice and clean, and have it fax well. Any thoughts? Would you want to see a snazzy document from someone you're hiring to be creative, or something you can read quickly and looks good across a multitude of delivery vehicles?

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