I enjoyed two of Jeanette Winterson’s books recently.

Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She was adopted by strict Pentecostal Evangelist parents and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire. Winterson’s childhood was Dickensian in it’s brutality–locked out of the house or into a coal cellar, shown no love, subject to the petty tyrannies of a bully of a mother. Her mother was devoutly religious but rather than seeing religion as a means of spreading love and understanding, she saw it as a way to chastise people. She was a misanthrope, a hater of mankind.

This book is her autobiography, the title is the literal response of the mother when Jeanette told her that she is happy loving another woman. In using a quote from a parent as a title, and in the Northern industrial setting of a childhood rescued by innate intelligence, a love of learning, and a university scholarship, her story is reminiscent of that of Fiona Hill’s in There is Nothing for You Here, reviewed previously.

Like Hill, Winterson turned her back on the narrow confines of her working class origins:

I didn’t want to be in the teeming mass of the working class…. I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between. I dreamed of escape — but what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community — to society?

.

.

On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.

And like Hill, she is aware of the wider implications of the declines of Britain’s once thriving Northern regions:

In the North people met in the church, in the pub, in the marketplace, and in those philanthropic buildings where they could continue their education and their interests. Now, maybe, the pub is left–but mainly nothing is left.

Her brilliance as a writer was shaped by an escape into fiction and poetry in the town library–a place of shelter from the storm of home life.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

The story of her life plays out in real time in the latter parts of the book. She writes a fictional account of her life in her best selling debut novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which her adopted mother is ashamed of and, when they finally meet, her birth mother inordinately proud.

Winterson has now written more than a dozen works of fiction. The most recent I read is the stunning retelling of Shakespeare’s late drama: The Winter’s Tale.

The Gap of Time

Winterson’s novel launched the Hogarth Press Shakespeare project which now includes seven novels that retell works by William Shakespeare for modern audiences.

To prepare, I read The Winter’s Tale (for the first time) and enjoyed the two-part drama, separated by a gap of sixteen years, which Shakespeare bridges in Act IV, Scene i with Time as a a chorus, hence the book title:

Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap…

While those who’ve read the play with benefit from an understanding many references and asides, the reader of Winterson’s novel is helped by a brief summary of “The Original” in her opening chapter.

The ‘cover version’ she writes adheres to characters and plot, but transposes the time from the Medieval Sicily and Bohemia to London in 2008, reeling from the financial crisis. At first glance, this seems improbable. However, the jealous Leontes, King of Sicily in the original, is re-cast as Leo Kaiser (geddit?), a disgraced banker, rebounded as a Bobby Alexrod (Billions) style leveraged buy-out plutocrat.

Many of characters names match the original;

• Mamillius, Leontes’ son = Milo
• Polixenes, King of Bohemia = Xeno
• Florizel, Polixenes’ son = Zel
• The old Shepherd = Shep
• etc.

Interestingly, two of the characters who retain their Shakespearean names unaltered are the heroine Perdita and, most amusingly, the lovable rogue Autolycus, a shady used car salesman!

As far as the plot and characters map the original, it’s a clever book. However, what, for me, elevated it into the stratosphere as one of the best books I’ve read, ever, is the scintillating prose.

Example, a meditation on loss:

My wife no longer exists. There is no such person. her passport has been cancelled. Her bank account closed. Someone else is wearing her clothes. But my mind is full of her. If she had never lived and my mind was full of her they’d lock me up for being delusional. As it is, I’m grieving.

.

.

EVERYTHING MUST GO.

That’s fine by me. Take it all away. The cars, the people, the goods for sale. Strip it back to the dirt under my feet and the sky over my head. Turn off the sound. Blank the picture. Nothing in between us now. Will I see you walking towards me at the end of the day? The way you did, the way we both did, dead tired, coming home from work? Look up and we see each other, first far away, then near? The energy of you in human form again. The atomic shape of your love.

The Gap of Time, p. 19-20

In addition to expressing herself in these terms, Winterson weaves in references to the play, which is why a reading of Shakespeare enhances an appreciation of this book. I probably missed many of these references, but a couple stood out, such as this line used as a chapter title on p.75

Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps.

The Winter’s Tale, Act I, Scene ii

And multiple references to this jealous rant by Leontes:

Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,

The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia’s nothing,

My wife is nothing, no nothing have these nothings,

If this be nothing.

The Winter’s Tale, Act I, Scene ii

The first reference in the novel immediately follows the quote on p. 20 above:

“It’s nothing,” she said, when she knew she was dying.

Nothing? The the sky is nothing and the earth is nothing and your body is nothing and our lovemaking is nothing . . .

And again:

He interrupted her. “It’s nothing. But these nothings . . . they . . .”

These nothings are nothing. But the sky is nothing, the earth is nothing. I am nothing, love is nothing, loss is nothing.

The Gap of Time, p. 230

What some have called the most romantic lines in English literature:

A cause more promising
Than a wild dedication of yourselves
To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores, most certain
To miseries enough; no hope to help you,
But as you shake off one to take another;
Nothing so certain as your anchors…

The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Scene iv

Is referenced at the moment of adoption:

It was a map of discovery. There were no more North Poles, or Atlantic Oceans or Americas. The moon had been visited. And the bottom of the sea.

But she was setting out with the blank sheet and compass of herself.

Unpathed waters. Undreamed shores.

The Gap of Time, p. 155

Time as a theme is referenced in ways large and small:

…they go back to bed to sleep and the city dreams itself into another day.

…Superman is powerful enough to belt the earth like Puck on speed and turn back time.

The evening was cooling into night.

The Gap of Time, pp. 237, 197, 230.

Plus, the broken-down car Autolycus tries to sell is a DeLorean — Back to the Future!

Throughout the book there are recursive references to Shakespeare, the title of the novel, and Winterson’s other works.

The final chapter is her meditation on the theme of forgiveness on the later play’s of Shakespeare, and how in The Winter’s Tale “the past depends on the future just as much as the future depends on the past.” She detects the seeds of psychoanalysis in decoding “how the past mortgages the future, or that the past can be redeemed.” Concluding, “And time, that sets all limits, offers our one chance at freedom from limits.”

Two books about libraries have delighted me.

Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr

I’ve just finished Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. The author of All the Light We Cannot See has crafted a delightfully complex novel that spans the centuries and features three very different libraries: the ancient, the contemporary, and the virtual. Three main characters: Anna, Zeno, and Konstance are united by the text of an ancient Greek manuscript which translates as the title of the novel.

Constantinople

Anna is a young orphan who discovers the original text in a monastery immediately before the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The ancient, abandoned library where she finds the treasure is a “round room, partially open to the sky, that smells of mud and moss and time…on the walls of this little chamber, scarcely visible in the moonlight fog, doorless cupboards run from floor to ceiling. Some are filled with debris and moss. But others are full of books.”

Lakeport, Idaho

Fast forward to a small town in Idaho (Doerr’s home state) in 2020 and Korean war vet, Zeno Ninis–who learned Greek in a POW camp–is rehearsing five children in a play based on the Cloud Cuckoo text he has translated. They are scheduled to perform in the town library which has been his refuge since he was a child. It’s “a light-blue two-story Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park.” A confused eco-terrorist who loves owls (which feature in the Greek text) is planning to blow the library up. Like Constantinople, this library is in a state of siege.

Interstellar space

Meanwhile, some decades in the future, Konstance is a young girl living with her family as they voyage light years across time and space to an earth-like planet, leaving behind a world devastated by climate change. Zuckerberg’s “metaverse” is fully instantiated and the few dozen adults and children on the voyage live in a sealed, windowless, spaceship. They are entertained by donning VR headsets and perambulating around the sum of human knowledge hosted by the AI known as “Sybil” (as opposed to, say, HAL or Alexa). On her tenth birthday she celebrates her “Library Day” when she’s allowed, for the first time, to don a Vizer and enter the virtual world:

She stands in a vast atrium. Three tiers of bookshelves, each fifteen feet tall, served by hundreds of ladders, run for what appear to be miles down either side. Above the third tier, twin arcades of marble columns support a barrel-vaulted ceiling cut through its center by a rectangular aperture, above which fluffy clouds float through a cobalt sky…through the air, for as far as she can see, books–some as small as her hand, some as big as the mattress on which she sleeps–are flying, lifting off shelves, returning to them, some flitting like songbirds, some lumbering along like big ungainly storks.

The secrets the library on the spaceship hold are key to the eventual resolution of the various strands in the book which Doerr unlocks in a grand finale. To say more would spoil the readers enjoyment.

The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig

I reviewed award-winning author Matt Haig’s How To Stop Time in 2018. His blockbuster The Midnight Library is a New York Times bestselling phenomenon, the Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction, The October 2020 Good Morning America Book Club Pick, and one of the Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year.

Other Lives

Similar to the virtual library in Cloud Cuckoo Land, Haig has written about a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life.

The protagonist, Nora Seed, finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her current life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist. She must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

While the virtual library in Cuckoo Land plays with the idea of a metaverse, Haig teases out the implications of a multiverse:

Between life and death there is a library…and within that library the shelves go on forever…Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.

Like the autonomous books in Cuckoo Land, the library Nora visits is animated:

The shelves on either side of Nora began to move. The shelves didn’t change angles, they just kept on sliding horizontally. It was possible that the shelves weren’t moving at all, but the books were, and it wasn’t obvious why or even how. There was no visible mechanism making it happen, and no sound or sight of books falling off the end – or rather the start – of the shelf. The books slid by at varying degrees of slowness, depending on the shelf they were on, but none moved fast.

The Midnight Library consoles Nora, who gradually learns to live without regret. Reviewers have noted that it gives a needed perspective at this difficult time in the world, teaches that the little things matter, and helps us learn to love being ourselves and not be influenced or concerned by how others see us.

Those who love libraries will appreciate these wonderful novels for the environments they explore and the vistas they reveal.

Over 60 members and guests of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association gathered in Lafayette last Saturday to hear NSA National President Dan Thurmon, CSP, CPAE, who presented a talk titled “Doing what it Takes: How to Differentiate & Deliver in Today’s Competitive Marketplace”.

Dan is an author, entrepreneur, workplace performance expert, fitness advocate, acrobat, unicyclist, and more. He’s delivered over 2,500 presentations on six continents in all 50 states and 33 countries, traveling over two million miles and completing…wait for it… over ten thousand backflips on stage!

Off Balance On Purpose

Dan believes we’ll never achieve “perfect balance.” Instead of chasing this impossible dream, we should learn to embrace uncertainty and initiate positive changes that lead to personal and professional growth.

His 2013 TedX talk (155,000 views and counting…) highlights the precarious nature of balance and illustrates his thesis that it’s best to live life “off balance on purpose” complete with handstands, back-flips and juggling:

Dan requested a number of times that no-one post video of his presentation, since video can’t do justice to the full impact of seeing him live. However, I assume he’s OK with the TedX video, and it’s fascinating for those who were in the room last Saturday to see how his content has evolved over the last five years.

Putting the Professionalism into Speaking

Dan first appeared in front of audiences at a young age, while still in grade school he performed at local Renaissance Faires. Now 50, he says that all professional speaking requires is “everything you’ve got”. He certainly delivered all he’s got while on stage.

The five balls he keeps in the air (literally!) include the work we do, our relationships, health, spiritual life and personal passions and interests. He pulled no punches when it came to the dynamic tension between doing what it takes to achieve success as a freelance speaker and the balance with relationships and family. He counsels that we should not compromise by focusing too much on one area at the expense of others. There’s a price to be paid for speakers who are on the road when kids sports games and celebrations are happening.

All speakers deliver three talks each time they are onstage:

• The one they planned to give
• The one they gave
• The one they think about while driving home.

Storytelling Insights

Dan shared the structure of the stories he tells onstage. His template details the hero’s journey as:

• Once upon a time… (setting the stage for the awakening)
• And every day… (establishing “normal life” as the point of departure)
• Until the day… (the inciting incident)
• Because of that… (on several different levels)
• Until finally… (the resolution)
• Ever since that day…

This is a great framework, one that shares some of the elements of Michael Hauge’s 10 Essential Elements of a Great Story, but is a simpler model for many of us to build our stories with.

Storyboarding

I was thrilled to see Dan’s portable storyboard. His use of colored Post-It’s to map the topics of a talk has strong echo’s of Nancy Duarte’s guidance in Resonate. The beauty of Dan’s board is that it’s completely portable. The savvy speaker can switch elements of the speech on the way to the auditorium. This is a powerful tool for speechwriters and public speakers.

I’d recommend checking out Dan’s blog for brief 2-3 minute videos where he shares insights in how to live “off-balance on purpose”. These are professionally edited…by his son! The most recent (Jan 15) is delivered in a snowstorm in Golden, Colorado. His YouTube channel has over 50 of these snappy ‘Weekly Coaching’ videos.

NSA National President

Dan became the President of the National Speakers Association this year. This video from the Greater Los Angeles Chapter was filmed last June and previews his presidency:

On Thursday, August 30th the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable hosted Jeff Davenport in a free conference call.

Jeff serves as an executive speaker coach and senior content developer at Duarte, the well-known communication design and consulting firm based in Santa Clara, founded by Nancy Duarte.

Using his background as a screenwriter and professional public speaker, Jeff helps clients communicate powerfully and persuasively by infusing story, dynamism, and empathy into their presentations. Whether he’s coaching high-level executives or thought leaders taking the stage for conference keynotes or commencement addresses, Jeff brings a thoughtful, personal touch to his roles, tapping into speakers’ personal passions and helping them create lasting connections with their audiences.

Jeff is a 2017 Cicero Award winner in the Public Policy category for his speech ‘Someday is Today’ delivered by Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor at CADE in Lima, Peru.

The call covered a wide range of topics including:

• How he went from a wallflower in high school to a premier public speaking coach.
• The secrets of the “Duarte Method” that any and all speechwriters can employ (Hint: read Resonate and Illuminate).
• The value of the DataStory training workshop available from Duarte that helps speechwriters structure a compelling argument based on analytical data.
• The three books on screenwriting he recommends speechwriters read:
1. Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field
2. Save the Cat!, by Blake Snyder
3. Into the Woods, by John Yorke
• What you’ll learn by watching the directors cut of Toy Story 3 on Blu-Ray.

Jeff’s parting words:

I would encourage anybody to do more public speaking, especially if you are writing for other people. We all had PE teachers who we realized never once played a sport. They were terrible PE teachers. So get out there and know what it’s like to play. Take a public speaking class. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. Do some sort of public speaking, writing for yourself and delivering yourself so you can get more in the heads of your clients and what know their true struggles are.

Otherwise, I would add, you’re forever the virgin trying to write a sex manual, aren’t you?

To hear the full discussion click on the podcast icon below.

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I’ve written many blog posts about the relevance of storytelling for speechwriters and public speakers.

Jo Ellision pays homage to Philip Roth, one of America’s great storytellers, in the Weekend Financial Times. The opening paragraph captures the power of story to sway us:

From the villagers tuning in to the troubadour of yore, to the Kindle-reader of today, the best storytelling has a physical power: the swell of awe you feel when a sentence unwinds as beautifully in structure as in sentiment; the emotional tension you feel in the gut. Then there’s the rapture of being so involved with a plot you come to dread the ending — and the mourning that follows. The greatest stories should leave you feeling fundamentally altered. Shattered. Exhilarated. Changed.

On May 24, 2018 the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable Held a conference call with Barbara Seymour Giordano. Barbara is a Story Doctor, Speechwriter and Presentation Coach who specializes in helping speakers tell memorable stories that audiences yearn to hear and share. Her specialty is guiding speakers — from the page to the stage — through the often murky and intricate process of bringing a story idea to life. She turns complex subjects into moving stories that spark imagination across cultures.

Over her career Barbara has advised Fortune 500 executives, entrepreneurs, scientists and TED presenters on creating and sharing stories that unite, influence and inspire audiences worldwide. Her fascination with story began when she worked as an assignment editor with CNN and E! Entertainment Television. She then parlayed her news experience into producing and directing corporate videos, global sales meetings and events for Amgen, Cisco Systems, and Nike among others. In front of the lens she’s appeared as an on-camera national TV fashion and beauty spokesperson for Lands’ End, Neiman Marcus, and TJX Corp. she delivers keynote speeches on topics that include The Art of Business of Storytelling, The Startup Pitch: Telling Stories Investors Want to Hear, and Storytelling TED Style. Her 360-degree communication experience allows her to offer a unique approach to crafting the stories that make speeches come alive..

The call covered a wide range of topics including:

• How she “backed into” speechwriting after helping coach executives in need of basic advice on presentation skills at large corporate events.
• The lessons she learned crafting 90-second investor pitches and 8-12 minute TED talks.
• Her appreciation of Toastmasters as the “learning gym” for presentation skills.
• The value of a simple one-page approach to the “hero’s journey” as a speech outline.
• How she helped PhD candidates in sociology, pharmacy other disciplines deliver content as a compelling story stripping out the techno-babble they were prone to use.
• The value of shows like Billions and Silicon Valley as an alternate view into the world of speechwriting and presentations that stands in contrast to the oft-quoted scenes from The West Wing.
• How to structure a speech around a story by starting from the desired outcome.
• How freelance speechwriters can find more clients.

To hear these and other topics discussed click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:44 — 12.8MB)

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I was saddened to hear of the death (at 90) of Marxist art historian John Berger.

I vividly recall reading Ways of Seeing as an undergraduate and, later, his sociological writings A Fortunate Man and A Seventh Man about migrant workers in Europe, years before the current crisis hit. His essays in the collection Portraits covers 74 artists who worked from 30,000 BC (the Chauvet Cave Painters) to the 20th century.

I was impressed by his collaboration with the Swiss director Alain Tanner. Indeed, the 1976 film Jonah who will be 25 in the year 2000 is the only movie I’ve ever watched six times in all. It formulated a good part of my world view as a young man.

Even more influential was his 1972 prizewinning novel simply titled ‘G‘. I read it the year it came out, in my second year at University. It’s a novel of sexual adventure and political awakening, heady stuff for any undergraduate. The closing paragraph, describing the sunlight on the ocean waves is a beautiful, trippy way of seeing:

The sun is low in the sky and the sea is calm. Like a mirror as they say. Only it is not like a mirror. The waves which are scarcely waves, for they come and go in many different directions and their rising and falling is barely perceptible, are made up of innumerable tiny surfaces at variegating angles to one another–of these surfaces those which reflect the sunlight straight into one’s eyes, sparkle with a white light during the instant before their angle, relative to oneself and the sun, shifts and they merge again into the blackish blue of the rest of the sea. Each time the light lasts for no longer than a spark stays bright when shot out from a fire. But as the sea recedes towards the sun, the number of sparkling surfaces multiples until the sea indeed looks somewhat like a silver mirror. But unlike a mirror it is not still. Its granular surface is in continual agitation. The further away the ricocheting grains, of which the mass becomes silver and the visibly distinct minority a dark leaden colour, the greater is their apparent speed. Uninterruptedly receding towards the sun, the transmission of its reflections becoming ever faster, the sea neither requires nor recognizes any limit. The horizon is the straight bottom edge of a curtain arbitrarily and suddenly lowered upon a performance.

His BBC series Ways of Seeing on which the book was based is available in multiple parts on YouTube. Here’s the first episode

Berger was an uncompromising visionary who was a major influence on my life.

Casting Light on the Dark Arts of Communications

Any book on communications that starts out quoting 19th century French sociologist Émile Durkheim has my attention. The authors embrace his idea of ‘collective effervescence’ to describe the magic of a group sharing a common purpose.

For Duarte and Sanchez, the common purpose they champion in the recently published Illuminate is driven by leaders, whom they term ‘Torchbearers’, envisioning new possibilities. They ‘light the path’ as they set out to change the world and bring ’Travelers’ on the journey along with them. If this sounds like the plot to Lord of the Rings, well, in addition to Durkheim, they quote Frodo Baggins, Aragorn and the others as they motivate the hobbits to set out on the quest for the Ring.

However, this book is anything but a fairy tale.

Duarte, Inc is one of the premier communications agencies in Silicon Valley. Since it was founded in 1990, Nancy Duarte has built a stellar reputation as a PowerPoint guru (with her first book, slide:ology) and general communications consultant (cemented by Resonate, her second book). With ‘Illuminate’ she has broadened her scope to include not only presentations and speeches, but stories, ceremonies and symbols. These are all weapons in the ‘torchbearer’s toolkit’ that can be employed to affect what people think, feel and do as they move through what she calls the ‘five stages of a venture’: Dream, Leap, Fight, Climb, and Arrive. If this sounds like the content of a classic 4×5 matrix, well, you’ll find it summarized in a handy-dandy fold-out between pages 58 and 59.

A speech for all seasons

Using this taxonomy allows you to choose the right tool for the job depending which stage an audience is on the journey. While not a ‘paint by numbers’ approach to communications, after reading Illuminate you will know what to deploy if, say, you need to rally the troops. The advice is to deliver a ‘battle speech’ or tell an ‘overcome the enemy story’ or hold a ‘rally the spirits’ ceremony. What I really liked about the classification is that we’re not left with the usual Pollyanna advice that assumes everything is wonderful. Each stage addressees the negative as well as the positive. So if people in an organization are resistant to change we are told what we might hear them say (“I just don’t see how this could work”) and advised on how to craft and deliver a ‘revolution’ speech or ‘neglect the call’ story. By dealing with the dark side of communications Duarte & Sanchez have given leaders a robust set of guidelines well suited to the real world.

Some of the most powerful parts of the book deal with how different organizations dealt with total failure: when PeopleSoft was bought by Oracle and the employees made the company sign into a makeshift memorial; how Coke reversed their disastrous decision to abandon Classic Coke; how Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors, addressed her employees when they needed to recall faulty ignition switches that had caused deaths.

Rich Case Studies

I was struck by the degree of first-hand knowledge and insight in the case studies that conclude the main chapters. Each one includes an extensive narrative and quotes that make the study come alive. There’s a bonus a multi-point summary of highlights. Showing their Silicon Valley roots, Duarte & Sanchez’s case studies include the usual suspects— tech titans like IBM and Apple. But there’s also a floor-covering company, a non-profit, and a fast-food company. Most appropriately, the concluding study is of Duarte, Inc itself, detailing the transformation the company underwent as it pivoted to overhaul systems and improve operations.

Like her previous books, Illuminate is a beautifully designed, eminently readable, detailed account of the scenarios those of us in corporate communications face on a daily basis. Read it if your job is to enable the Torchbearer’s to ignite change, Frodo would certainly make sure it’s on his bookshelf back in the Shire.

Charis Kubrin, Professor of Criminology, Law and Society, U.C. Irvine, is a renowned specialist in criminology and law. In this TEDx talk she shares with passion and mastery a story of Rap on Trial that elucidates the fundamental issues our society faces in relation to freedom of speech, liberty, equality and justice. This speech was written with the help of Barbara Seymour Giordano and was awarded the 2015 Cicero Speechwriting Award for a controversial or highly politicized topic. The full text follows and a video of the presentation is at the end of this posting. It is reprinted here with express permission.

Rap on Trial, Charis Kubrin

Have you ever been given a set of facts, and based on that evidence, come to a conclusion that made you believe you were absolutely right?

A few years back a defense attorney contacted me to ask if I would be an expert witness in a case involving an aspiring rapper who had been charged with making a terrorist threat. This would be my first official expert witness case — so I jumped at the chance! And as a Professor of Criminology as well as a Rap Music Scholar… I could hardly wait to share my expertise.

So as soon as I received the evidence, I immediately got to work. Now, the entire case came to trial as a result of these 6 short lines of text — and here’s how they read:

glock to the head of
SEND $2 to . . . . paypal account
if this account doesn’t reach $50,000 in the next
7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the
VT shooting will occur at another prestigious
highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!

OK, admittedly these words sitting on the page all by their lonesome make it pretty darn easy to jump to a conclusion about what this rapper was up to, right? And I’ve got to admit that when I read these words for the first time, even my gut reaction was — this guy is so guilty!

But I knew from my years of research that you can’t pass judgment until all the evidence has been reviewed.

So I began by trying to figure out how these words had landed in the hands of the Southern Illinois University campus police. One day while on patrol, the campus police spotted an abandoned car, searched it, and found typical college student possessions inside — along with a piece of paper inconspicuously tucked between the driver’s seat and the center console.

On one side of the folded up paper were the 6 lines of threatening text. And when you flipped the paper over, there were line after line of what appeared to be rap lyrics—such as:

let them booty cheeks hop, so
Pop it mami pop it
I’ma do it like this daddy
follow that thang to da ground when she drop it.
(Probably not a song destined for the top 40, right?)

The minute I saw these rhyming rap lyrics on the opposite side of the threatening text — I had a sneaking suspicion that this college student was not a plotting terrorist, but most likely an aspiring gangsta rapper.

However, that’s not how the police saw it … these 6 lines of text were enough evidence to get a search warrant, and comb through the defendant, Olutosin Oduwole’s, campus apartment. Inside they found several other notebooks filled with his violent and misogynistic rap lyrics and… a handgun.

As a result, the police charged Oduwole — a college student with no prior convictions — with attempting to communicate a terrorist threat. While Oduwole admitted to the gun possession charges, he adamantly denied he was a terrorist planning to carry out acts of violence. Oduwole stood by his story that the text was simply notes for a new rap song.

In preparation for testifying, I reviewed hundreds of pages of evidence from Oduwole’s notebooks —

As I painstakingly analyzed the notebook evidence line by line wading through stanza after stanza of misogynistic and violent lyrics, I would land upon an occasional random page — notes from class, a letter to a girl, and the terms of the rap contract Oduwole one day dreamed of landing.

After careful review of these notebooks I came to the conclusion that Oduwole was unequivocally NOT a terrorist. He was just a wanna-be rapper whose offensive and shocking lyrics were — out of a fear of terrorism — being completely misinterpreted.
Trial day arrived and after months of research on this case, I was ready to share my findings — that is, until I entered the courtroom and stood face to face with an all-white, middle-aged jury. It was 2011… I could barely believe my eyes.

But despite the lack of diversity, I was sure the evidence would prevail. So when I took the stand, I spent two hours educating the jury on the finer points of gangsta rap — for example, in the rap world the more violent the lyrics, the more respect you’ll have in the rap community. And the more misogynistic and violent your music? Well, the more songs you’ll sell. Considering the business, it was no surprise that Oduwole’s lyrics portrayed a violent persona and the glorification of guns — both of which are staples of gangsta rap.

I also pointed out that not all lyrics rhyme or flow — and that the 6 lines of text that the prosecution had rested their case on could be what’s referred to in the music business as an “Intro or Outro” — or unrhymed spoken words that either introduce or conclude a song to give it more edge or make it more memorable.
In my professional opinion, the 6 lines of text were most likely ideas or concepts for a song, or… were the Intro or Outro to a song — not a terrorist threat.
When I left the stand I was completely confident that I’d gotten all my points across and compellingly delivered my ideas.

And in just three short hours — the verdict. Guilty.

Oduwole was sentenced to 5 years and immediately whisked away to prison.

I was completely stunned. How was the jury unable see the truth?

For weeks I replayed the case over and over in my mind — how was the prosecution’s argument more persuasive than my highly researched evidence?

And then it dawned on me — while I had presented the cold, hard facts…the prosecuting attorney dialed up the courtroom emotion and played to the jury’s fears. At one point he actually slammed down Oduwole’s gun on the witness stand, leaned in close, stared me dead in the eye, and asked, “Now does THIS GUN change your opinion about what is written in the 6 lines of text?”

It was in that moment it became clear how the prosecution swayed the jury — emotions trump logic every time.

And the power of emotions lead me to this question — would this case be the same if the defendant was white?

I mean think about it —

STUDENT + WHITE MALE + RAP = WANNA BE RAPPER

But if you add GUN to the equation, well… that white student has lost his way, and needs counseling.

On the other hand, if you swap out black male for white it adds up to this:

STUDENT + BLACK MALE + RAP = HEADED FOR TROUBLE.

And if you add GUN, well … then he’s certainly = A THUG, DESTINED FOR PRISON.

It’s been three years since I testified in the Oduwole case — and since then I’ve wondered…is he the only aspiring rapper this has happened to?

Knowing the system failed this young man and sent him to prison for terrorism troubled me to the core — and thankfully, I was not alone.

The verdict drew widespread scrutiny from first amendment rights’ attorneys, journalists, musicians, and academics alike. There were op-eds featuring this case, including several by an assistant professor at the University of Richmond who specializes in rap and hip hop culture.

Within short order this professor and I joined forces and discovered that rap lyrics are showing up with alarming regularity as evidence in courtrooms across the country — in fact, our research has uncovered hundreds of these cases.

And what’s so crazy is that it’s virtually unheard of for musicians outside of rap to have their lyrics introduced as evidence against them in court — not for rock, not for punk, not EVEN for heavy metal.

Over the last year my colleague and I have publicized our research findings — and just last month, we wrote a brief to educate the Justices about gangsta rap for a rap lyrics case that will soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In all our work, we argue that rather than treat rap music as an art form, in these cases prosecutors portray rap lyrics as autobiographical — in other words, they want the jury to believe that these rappers are just sharing the stories of their lives.

The trouble with labeling rap as autobiographical is that the characters being portrayed in rap music are often nothing like the actual artists.
Seriously, if rappers were guilty of even the tiniest fraction of violence they project in their music, well, we’d all be in really big trouble.

And in some cases like Oduwole’s, the lyrics themselves are the crime — being positioned as an imminent danger to the public. But no matter the prosecution’s tactics, introducing lyrics as evidence in court…almost always results in unfair prejudice.

Unfortunately, this fact isn’t always clear to judges and juries —
In case after case, the results have been devastating for the accused — defendants have been found guilty and sent off to prison.

But why?

In an experimental study, a social psychologist presented two groups of diverse subjects with an identical set of violent lyrics.
The first group was told the lyrics came from a rap song, and the second… from a country song.

What was discovered was the first group — who was told they had rap lyrics — found the words to be more threatening and dangerous… compared to the group who was told they had country.

Even though the lyrics on the page were exactly the same, each group likely had preconceived ideas about both types of music — country is made by good-old southern white boys while rap is made by urban black criminals.

So essentially what happens is… by the prosecution playing with the jury’s preconceived notions about rap music, they also tap into race — which ratchets up public fear and reinforces old and new stereotypes about young men of color as inherently dangerous and threatening.

Which leads me to this —

Are these increases in rap trials just another sign that racism in this country is alive and well? And how many more false convictions and acts of violence — against our own people — will it take before we say… enough?

For me the tipping point will arrive when we admit as a country that we’re still playing out old racial stereotypes. Then — and only then — is when we’ll begin to heal from our collective and historical wounds. We have to remember — and never lose sight of the fact — that our nation and its people are one; indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Members of the Silicon Valley Speechwriters Roundtable joined speechwriter, screenwriter and author Mike Long on a conference call earlier this week. This is the second of two edited highlights of the call. In part one Mike talked about becoming a freelance speechwriter.

In this second edited highlight, Mike talks about how his experience as a screenwriter helps him write better speeches and the core elements essential to any story. To hear what he said, click on the podcast icon below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:53 — 1.7MB)

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