Kelly Ramsey is a former wildland firefighter and debut author of Wildfire Days, a gripping memoir about her time as the only woman on an elite hotshot crew battling megafires in California. With raw honesty, she shares the physical, emotional, and cultural toll of life on the fireline—and what it reveals about a West increasingly shaped by climate-fueled disaster. Find […]
Barrett Klein investigates mysteries of sleep in societies of insects, creates entomo-art, and is ever on the search for curious connections that bind our lives with our six-legged allies. Barrett studied entomology at Cornell University and the University of Arizona, fabricated natural history exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, worked with honeybees for his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, […]
I’ve finally come to the end of a full set of Method Initiative exercises! Honestly, after going through it 4 times, it feels pretty good to finally finish a set! Let’s review how I feel now that they’re done. The Final Exercise For the last exercise of method Initiative, I had to connect with 10 people who are potentially very […]
For the first time ever, I’ve made it to the final exercises in Josh Spodek’s Initiative book on bringing your passions to life. It took four rounds of going back to square one and building up a project and over 4 years, but I finally found a project that resonated enough with me to keep wanting to push forward: a […]
For Exercise 8, the goal was to come up with a spreadsheet detailing out the financials for The Campfire (still my working title for this event!), per my visual model from Exercise 7. I started out basic and tried not to add any of the extra stuff like sound/lighting techs, marketing teams, or anything that just felt like it would […]
The purpose of Exercise 6 of Method Initiative was to get more advice, but this time from people “closer to your field.” This means we’re going a step beyond friends and family to people who may actually have some experience in the field of your project. Since my project is creating a story-telling session with nature as a theme, initially […]
If you’ve been following my Initiative exercises this time around, you might be wondering where my Exercise 6 reflection is. The answer is: I’m still working on exercise 6, since getting 10 people who can give me advice on my project takes some time. Because finishing exercise 6 wasn’t really hindering starting exercise 7, I just went ahead and did […]
The goal of Initiative Exercise 5 was to find 5 people who feel the problem my project describes and hear the problem in their words, not mine. Initially, when I started looking for people who possibly feel the problem I described, I assumed I’d be talking to just two main groups: people who are already involved in the world of […]
Project Reminder In case you were trying to remember what my newly select project was… Problem: Environmental conversations carry a stigma that hinders people from discussing their feelings of joy about nature, and horror, alarm, and grief over it’s destruction. In the end, they just end up feeling alone and misunderstood. Solution: Organize a Nature Story-Sharing Meetup, fostering a community […]
UPDATE: I just realized I accidentally did exercises 2 and 3 together before writing this reflection. Whoops. Changed the title and graphic to account for it! For the last Initiative project I did, I was focused on trying to find something that would align with my work, figuring that if it is another part of my job, it would be […]