BarbaraArdingerWriting - My Online Vita

photograph by Jon Harwood

About ba

"What's this 'ba'?" I hear you asking. Back in the olden days while I was earning my Master's degree, I worked as a secretary to five psychologists. As proper secretaries do, I used "secretarial initials" at the end of the letters I typed: ba. Then I started using ba to sign notes and cards. And I've been doing it ever since. Typing two lowercase letters is a lot faster than typing a whole name.

Now I'm supposed to tell you about myself. Being both vain and pedantic, I'll start by saying that I hold a Ph.D. degree in English Renaissance literature (that is, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and their contemporaries). My dissertation topic was the persona of Cleopatra VII (the famous queen of Egypt) as portrayed in English drama, 1592-1898.

Early on, I discovered that reading good writing helps you learn how to write better. Just as artists study the "great masters" and sometimes sit in museums copying great paintings, writers read good fiction and nonfiction and absorb, consciously or unconsciously, an idea of what good writing can be. Although I'm an unregenerate feminist, I still recognize that the famous "dead white men" have given us a lot of good writing. It's important to be familiar with the "canon," that is, the literature that has influenced our culture (such as it is) for past two or three thousand years and provides the ground floor upon which we, every time we speak or read or listen, construct the reality we live in.

Today, of course, we write differently. Nevertheless, if we want people to understand what they're reading, we still need to write clearly and simply. (The one sin I believe in is making someone read a paragraph or a page more than once because it didn't make sense the first time.) The times also call for new words—"hera" to replace "hero," for example, because we no longer believe in that old "generic male by preference" rule, or "ovular" to replace "seminal" because important work does indeed begin with women, and "thealogy" because not all spiritual thought is focused on gods.

At the same time, however, I am fairly conservative about language and believe that we should respect its history and construction. That is, if there's already a word that works, it may not be necessary to make up a new one. A couple years ago, for example, I campaigned on line against the word "gaialog." Using this stupid word instead of "dialog" to indicate women talking makes me crazy. (If "gaialog" meant anything, which it doesn't, it might mean "earth speaking.") If you want to be speak sexistically, however, try "gynelog." (There—I've just made up two new words in a row.) (Don't tell me to be consistent. There are few hobgoblins in my mind.) Language is an issue I frequently discuss with the authors whose books I edit. I've even been known to issue gooder-English fatwas: I told one author he can't ever use points of ellipsis (…) again in his whole life and another that she's already used up her life supply of the word "grab" in all its variants. And I get Real Fuss-Budgetty about etymology; we don't need to invent cognates ("sphere" and "spirit" are not related), verbize nouns (I hate "liase"), or nominalize or adjectivize verbs ("calendarize"? I don't think so!). Nor, just because English has the largest vocabulary of any language on the planet, do we need to use every synonym we can find in the thesaurus just because some old teacher told us not to keeping using the same word. That's nonsense. A, no word is absolutely identical in meaning to another. "Think" is not the same as "cogitate" is not the same as "ponder" is not the same as "opine." B, if we keep changing the name of something, our readers will forget what we're talking about. C, if we use fancier and fancier verbs, our readers will just start laughing. And don't even get me started on overwrought adverbs. Sigh…end of rant.

Although I love to write about the Goddess, I am not simply a niche writer, and the Goddess is not my only topic. I have, for example, been a technical writer/editor in four or five different industries, including aerospace, construction, and computers. (One aerospace proposal I worked on ended up as tall as I am.) I used to tell engineers that I was helping them with "gooder English." That little joke seemed to relax them when I went after their input with a red pen, a knife, an axe, a bulldozer, and an ocean of white-out. (This was in the olden days before word processing.) I once wrote label copy for shampoo and dog food. I wrote sales material for multi-level marketing companies. I wrote manuals for a company that made wash and care labels for the garment industry. I edited a book about AIDS (which led me to become an AIDS emotional support volunteer) and material for a consultant who taught public relations to law firms. I edited a booklet about stocks written by a lawyer, an accountant, and a PR executive. (Imagine how reader-friendly that was!) I also wrote and self-published a little book on networking "for the innocent, the perplexed, and the hungry," a "brochure planning guide," and a small book of revisionist fairy tales (all long out of print). And just in case you need an editor, I love helping other writers with less experience than I have not embarrass themselves in print.

I've also been a teacher. Among other things, I taught high school English and speech, business writing to adults, and public speaking to Marines. (The last was the most fun.)

Back in the early 1980s, I was working as a technical writer/editor in a company that manufactured mini-computers. I was also reading books on literary criticism and mainstream metaphysics, and I had recently started a correspondence course on meditation and the Qabalah with a famous English author. The famous author and I soon decided, both of us at the same time, that his course of study wasn't for me. But all of these things led me to write "Popeye as Deity," for which I even made up fake but scholarly footnotes. Yes, I had way too much time on my hands at the computer company.

During the 1990s, I wrote articles for several business magazines in Orange County, California, and was a regular columnist for two of these magazines. I'm sure I was OC Metro's strangest columnist, for I almost never wrote about the proper "business topics." Real Family Values is one of my columns. It's a true story about my brother, and when it won a prize, I sent the wall plaque to him. Many people have told me how this story touched their hearts.

There's another story many friends have enjoyed: it's very short and features my wonderful cats.

Professor John Bierk was my very first college teacher-freshman comp 101, 8 a.m., MWF. After several weeks of class, he asked me to come to his office. When I obediently showed up, he praised my writing and invited me to join the yearbook staff, which I did. A dozen years later, I helped edit and proofread John's Ph.D. dissertation. (I remember something about social Darwinism in it.) When I flew back to Cape Girardeau, MO, for 2006 Homecoming, I stayed with another friend, and John came to dinner. I gave him a signed copy of Pagan Every Day, in which I wrote, "Is this where English 101 ends up?"

In a recent email to me, John wrote, "I appreciate your compliment concerning my influence on you, but the hard fact is that you wrote very well when you got to me; thus, all I can claim is that I gave you a further chance to express yourself in writing."

John isn't a pagan. He's a skeptic about the matters of gods. "Thank you for the autographed copy of your new book," he wrote to me. "I was impressed by your scholarly approach to stories about pagans and the history of pagan gods and spirits, but except for psychological insights, I long ago became quits with fictions which are presented as a description of reality and/or a blue-print for final meaning…."

"With all that said," John concluded, "your approach to pagan gods, goddesses, and ritual is of an entirely different nature. Your purpose is the celebration of life, and you use paganism as one way to accomplish this end. Whatever works is my motto--as long as the method never hurts, marginalizes, and destroys others who approach life differently. In other words, I fully approve of you and your beliefs and practices. Isn't it amazing," he concluded in that email, "that time simply evaporates when after some 30 years two good friends meet face to face? Ah, it's like finding the extraordinary in our ordinary lives."

I suspect that Professor John Bierk and I will have a long conversation now. I still give him credit for validating the writing talent of a shy college freshman. Perhaps he's a sort of grandfather of the work I'm doing now.

email: bawriting@earthlink.net