Empty Nest Expat helped me transition to a new phase of life faster
My first career was in community publishing so I was a media creator in legacy media from my early twenties onward. None of it was fancy. Indeed, the shopping guides, real estate magazine, and business newspaper I published were functional, useful properties. It gave me experience at coming up with special sections based on a creative brief and selling advertising around it. I think it made me feel empowered to jump in with digital media when I felt I had something I wanted to say. I was shocked to discover that I was considered an experienced digital creator based on the quiz in Chapter One of Create to Learn, scoring an 11 for all the different ways I had created media already. I was actually surprised.
Pre-internet, I had very conventional American media habits of corporate TV and reading books and magazines. These days, I no longer watch corporate broadcast TV, beginning to turn away when the networks were bought by still larger corporate entities as a means of messaging the population. Now, if I ever turn on a broadcast network, I count how many seconds it takes for a gun to appear on screen. I find it is usually less than 20–30 seconds.
Having listened to the NYT Down the Rabbit Hole podcast, I realized then that I missed the whole YouTube craze. This week, reading more about how youth love YouTube, I realized I still don’t even understand how subscribing to YouTube works. After all, I don’t have a feed like Facebook or Twitter, so where does the video show up? See how completely I missed this? I must not be image driven, as I have to remind myself to look at Instagram to keep up with my kids. While Instagram is always pretty, I don’t feel compelled to go there, and only do so to see what my family is doing.
My favorite forms of digital media have been blogging, digital books via Kindle, Twitter & Facebook. When my children graduated from high school, I did not want to waste time experiencing the cliché yearning of an empty nester, so I decided to start a blog to help me emotionally pivot from being a single mom to moving abroad to live overseas. I needed to downsize in real life to do it, but I needed to emotionally shift gears too. My blog, Empty Nest Expat, helped me think out the transition. It was recommended by three newspapers on three different continents: the Wall Street Journal in North America, the London Telegraph in Europe, and the Daily Sabah newspaper in Anatolia (Asia). I loved writing that blog because I got to experience everything twice, once when I did something, and a second time when I wrote about it. It was really hard to justify the time required to blog once I discovered Facebook because I could communicate much the same stuff in ten minutes vs. a whole half day spent formatting copy and images.
I am having so much fun as the Executive Director and managing editor of the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative blog. I started as a guest editor, curating #TurkishLiteratureMonth and organizing 19 contributors to help me present 50 different titles. Then, I took over as managing editor, and have had incredibly joyful collaborations with month-long presentations of literature such as #SouthAsianLit in Translation, #DutchKidLitMonth (featuring the books of the children rated happiest in the world by UNICEF), and my very favorite collaboration, #SDGMonth, organizing 26 teacher librarians in 16 countries to present books for kids to tackle the SDGs. We ended up with 320 non-U.S./non-U.K. titles. It was so thrilling!
One of my most frequent forms of collaborations on digital media is via book clubs. The World Economic Forum asked me to kick off this decade with a book of my choice for their 180,000 member book club. I chose Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s We Should All Be Feminists. Wow, was that ever fun! I also founded Dear Alyne’s Book Club, with around 30,000 members, started an Anti-Racist Librarians Book Club of around 4,000 members, and participate in two book clubs here in Istanbul. The pandemic has almost enhanced our Istanbul experience. Since we have had to move the discussions online, we make a point of getting the author to come. They always say yes. I use Facebook to convene people for book clubs and events all the time.
I think the three aspects of my personality that are conducive to digital authorship are my love of discovery, my love of sharing discovery through writing, and collaboration. Collaboration is exhilarating!
The best thing that could happen to me as a digital author is continued self-growth and discovery. I also am looking for my next position, so using these digital authoring skills as an educator, a librarian, or some yet-unknown way is fun to look forward to as well.
