Feeling Anxious? Take Action.

It's the new year and we should be feeling energized, the whole marketed "new year, new you" phenomenon, but if you're like me, it's becoming increasingly hard to shed feelings of chronic anxiety. Working Women recently interviewed me on effective strategies for dealing with anxiety. "Many of us have experienced anxiety in one way or another. Perhaps you couldn’t sleep prior to a presentation or your stomach dropped whenever your boss mentioned layoffs. But while anxiety may be fed by real, external factors – the economy is bad, your industry is in trouble – it is how we process it internally that keeps it under control. The next time you feel a wave of panic coming on, adopt these strategies to minimize your worry.

Get moving. You likely know that meditation is recommended for calming the mind. But if that just isn’t for you, there are other ways to ease stress through physical exertion. Try going for a power walk on your break to detach from the challenge of the moment. Observing other people going about their business can help you decompress. If you can, sign up for a fitness class. Whether it’s kickboxing or yoga, moving in unison with a group of like-minded people for a sustained period of time can prove more supportive than working out alone. Relish the comforts of home. If your anxiety spikes at the office, incorporate a memento from your personal life into your workspace. Find a desk drawer where you can keep a meaningful object that lifts your spirits and draws you outside the feedback loop in your head, such as a drawing your child made, a shell you found on vacation, or a photo of a loved one. When your worry begins to gain the upper-hand, take a moment to plant your feet firmly on the ground, close your eyes, and take a few deep breaths. Then open your eyes and gaze at the object. This practice should change your perspective and lift your mood. Take action. When you feel that tightened sensation in your chest, don’t just crawl into bed and wait for it to pass. Instead, channel your stress into something productive. Don’t just worry about an upcoming meeting, sit down and write out your presentation. Then get up and rehearse it. You can transform your anxiety by accomplishing simple tasks, reaffirming your sense of control. Put it in perspective. When the inner-dialogue won’t cease, how often do you locate the root of the problem? You might be upset because your team missed a deadline, and now you’re envisioning a personal Armageddon. But perhaps that’s not the real source of your anxiety. For example, you could be thinking about starting a business of your own, and it’s not the fear of losing your job, but rather the fear of embarking on a new venture. Of course, this transition will probably be difficult at first, but worst case scenario, this could be a blessing in disguise."

My Search For My Disappearing Grandfather

It's the Christmas season and I'm thinking of family.  A few years ago I wrote this piece about my search for the grandfather I never knew. No one spoke of my grandfather Kreamer, not ever. Even his given name was a mystery. All anyone seemed to know was that he had disappeared before my father's fourth birthday. And when my father died a few years ago, I assumed that any hope of knowing anything more about my grandfather—his father—had evaporated.

So last year, as I intermittently corresponded with a distant relative I'd met through an on-line genealogy site, I was stunned by the following e-mail from her: "My cousin just wrote me and sent the following text from an article she found this afternoon. Hope this isn't a shock to you." The newspaper story, from the February 16, 1927, edition of the Glen Elder Sentinel, was headlined "J. H. Kraemer Still Missing." (The routine misspelling of our name is obviously a longstanding phenomenon.) The paper went on to report that "J. H. Kraemer, missing cashier" from the local bank, "has never yet returned and no news has been obtained of his whereabouts. A good many people over the county still think that he will come back and assist in straightening out the affairs of the bank."

"Straightening out the affairs of the bank"—could a phrase be more suggestively, intriguingly vague and expansive?

The Glen Elder bank was affiliated with the State Bank of Downs, Kansas. Dan Harrison, from a prominent family in the area, had cofounded the Downs bank and served several terms as mayor, and several as a state senator. My grandmother, Catherine "Toots" Harrison Kreamer, was his daughter. It made sense that my grandfather Kreamer worked in his father-in-law's business.

But no wonder no one spoke of him. He wasn't just any criminal—he'd stolen from his in-laws!

This isotope of information meant just one thing: I needed to go to Downs, a farming community of 1,100 in north-central Kansas that I had last visited, from my hometown of Kansas City, when I was nine—39 years before.

I persuaded my 14-year-old daughter, Lucy, to accompany me on this Nancy Drew-ish adventure. There are no scheduled planes, passenger trains, or even buses that stop near Downs. We flew from New York to Omaha (where my mother-in-law lived) and rented a car for the six-hour trip west into the middle of the middle of America. The route we mapped to Downs, which is 20 miles south of the geographic center of the 48 contiguous states, was along Route 77, the Homestead Expressway, into Kansas and "Pony Express country" as a posted road sign announced. Our family is always inclined to drive the back roads, and in Kansas, where the speed limit on two-lane highways is 65 and all roads run clean and straight, those byways are efficient—and their vistas are sublime. I had mouthwateringly imagined stopping for dinner at some great little mom-and-pop restaurant for the chicken-fried steak with cream (not brown) gravy that I remembered from childhood. But over hundreds of Blue Highway miles there was no such place to be found. On the other hand, there were virtually no fast-food restaurants—the thin and declining Great Plains population density cannot support the national chains.

After a pizza dinner, we drove due west on Route 24, through the Flint Hills, the little-known, classic-western-movie scenery of north-central Kansas, into the twilight. As a kid, I'd endured the drive to my grandmother's house: flat tedious mile followed flat tedious mile. So I was surprised to find how much the landscape itself—the dramatic simplicity of infinite cornfields against the distant horizon—moved me. On no conscious level had I been aware, during these last 30 years on the East Coast, that this vast emptiness was inextricably linked to my notion of myself. I hadn't imagined how beautiful it would seem to me—or to Lucy, who was seeing it for the first time. We were giddy with space, and stopped repeatedly to take pictures of isolated clapboard churches; miles of glowing sunflower fields; white gravel roads serpentining through endless green corn; hulking, centipede-like irrigation systems hurling water into the dry soil; and abandoned farmhouses surrounded by cottonwood windbreaks whose canopies were punctuated by ramshackle mills. Dust devils bobbed and danced in distant fields. And the streaming plumes of dust roiled up by farmers out tilling their land billowed on the horizon. The bulbous water tower of each (barely) inhabited place seemed to cry, "Look, here, we exist!" long before any other human presence was visible.

We passed exactly two cars, both of them going east, during the final 45-minute stretch of our all-day trip. As we drove through Cawker City (population 585), I was disappointed by the "largest ball of twine in the world." In my memory it was a grand, wonderfully absurd, amber-colored sphere as big as a house, on display beneath a strikingly modernistic circa-1960 geodesic dome. But today it seemed more like a minivan-sized pile of dirty rags under a carport.

Glen Elder (population 448) looked as if a neutron bomb had been dropped on it. No one was out sitting or walking or puttering. Bikes had been left splayed on their sides in yards. Apparently empty buildings stood silent. These stretches of the plains are lands that time forgot—but for my time-traveling purposes that was a good thing. When we finally arrived in Downs, around nine at night, the town looked hardly different from the sepia-toned, panoramic 1901 photograph of Downs that hangs on my living room wall in New York. Driving along the main street, I remembered exactly my grandmother's old address, 509 Division Street, and was able to find it—as my father always said to congratulate himself and my mother on successful navigations—"like a homing pigeon."

Lucy and I made our base camp at the Howell House, an impeccably restored Victorian bed-and-breakfast. Our first stop the next morning was my grandmother's place, just a few minutes' walk away. My strongest memory of it had been the wraparound sleeping porch where we'd escaped the stifling summer heat and watched fireflies glimmer in Mason jars with lids punched by a rusty ice pick—our only source of light. The porch was gone, and the house "modernized" in ways I disliked, but the bones of the place were still there and anchored me in my grandmother's presence.

I was able to track down her nephews, Bill Harrison, a 79-year-old retired gallery owner living in Taos, New Mexico, and Bogue Harrison, 74, and living in Panama City, Florida. I'd talked with Bill maybe once in my life, when I was about six years old, but he reacted to my call without missing a beat. "Well," he said, "now that you bring it up, when I was little, Jack Kreamer simply wasn't mentioned." My grandfather's name was Jack! Bill had worked at the family bank in Downs during college summer breaks in the 1940's, and remembered one incident very specifically: his father saying, "I want to show you something," taking him into the big bank vault, and digging out a three-inch-thick bundle of 20-year-old checks, wrapped with adding machine tape, that totaled over $45,000.

"These are the checks that Jack Kreamer bounced trying to cover his gambling debts," Bill's father told him, "and your grandfather covered them with his own cash." The tone of disgust used by Bill's dad left his son in no doubt about the in-laws' regard for Jack—$45,000 in 1927 was the equivalent of half a million dollars today.

The picture in my mind of my grandfather became both cloudier and more exciting. Was he an embezzler or just an extravagant bettor?Or both?Where in the middle of nowhere, in the pious, Protestant plains of Prohibition, could Jack have gambled on that scale?How far would he have had to go—Kansas City is 200 miles east and Denver 400 miles west—to lose such a sum?Was it possible that my grandfather was still alive somewhere, a very old man living high off his bank spoils?Had he started a new family?I was imagining Newman and Redford in The Sting. And I knew that my father, who had loved mystery novels, would have delighted in my speculations.

I decided that one of the best ways to follow Jack's trail was through the bank. Jerry Berkeley, who bought the State Bank of Downs from my relatives in the 1970's, had known nothing about my grandfather's criminal history, but I turned him into a fellow detective. He uncovered a lawsuit, filed in 1930, alleging that J. H. Kreamer had left the county in 1927 to avoid being served with a summons relating to large debts he owed the Central Kansas Cattle Loan Co. Jim Vandergiesen, a contemporary of my grandparents, suggested that the "gambling" Jack had indulged in might have been something that in the 1920's they'd called "bucking the board." Folks would go to the "elevator," the local grain storage depot and market, and place a bid speculating on crop futures. Jim also whispered that a local woman, another contemporary, said that she'd "heard Jack Kreamer had done time." The very language was a little thrilling: I pushed on with my quest.

I learned that my grandfather had grown up in Jewell, Kansas, another small town (population 483), about 30 miles from Downs. Lucy and I drove to Jewell knowing absolutely no one there. We stopped at the town library and looked through local burial records. There I found my Kreamer relatives. Jack Kreamer's parents—my great-grandparents—and his sister Edith are buried in the Jewell cemetery. The librarian suggested we might pick up more information if we went to the Scoop, a local ice cream shop where a group of older women gathered every afternoon to drink coffee and chat.

We went. Betty James, a 72-year-old widow, stunned Lucy and me—accustomed as we were to the New York mind-your-own-business M.O.—by opening her house to us, two unknown travelers, in the old and pure way of Midwestern hospitality. At the city office next door to the Scoop, Lucy plowed through a book listing every graduate of Jewell High School for the past century, and hit upon the real key to our family history: Charlotte Kreamer, class of 1941. By phone that night I tracked down Charlotte, now 79 years old and living 90 miles away in Council Grove, Kansas, and her 87-year-old sister, Katherine, who lives in Holton, yet another little Kansas town, about 100 miles away. They are nieces of my grandfather Jack. Katherine was a flower girl at Jack and Catherine's wedding in 1921; both women had known my grandfather and spoke freely about him. They were the first people I'd ever known who did. "I don't know why he turned out to be the black sheep," Katherine said.

Their half sister, Margaret Ann, told me more: "Jack had a charming personality. My father"—Jack's brother Fred—"said he could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo, and that he'd give you the shirt off his back." Margaret Ann had inherited her Aunt Edith Kreamer's belongings,including a photograph of my grandfather in his twenties, an up-and-coming young member of the Commerce Club of Jewell. I had never seen a picture of him before. I found myself staring at the face, both strange and familiar, seeing in his features my father's and my own. From some old letters of Edith's, I learned that she had been the one to send my grandfather, her little brother, away from Kansas in 1927. "When the trouble was slowly killing Grandfather Kreamer, I begged him [Jack] to go away as far as he could." In other words, the shock expressed in that original small-town newspaper story was, perhaps, somewhat disingenuous.

And I also discovered, in my great-aunt's papers, that in 1943 my grandfather Jack Kreamer died, at age 48, penniless and alone, working in a lumber camp in northern California. His sister Edith paid $3.50 for his headstone in Shasta County.

As my grandfather's story came into focus, I found that it had been no romantic caper after all, but something more complicated, even tragic—more like Theodore Dreiser or John Steinbeck than The Sting—and compelling in ways I hadn't anticipated and that will take time for me to digest.

I intend to stay in touch with this family I never knew about. And I'll continue to dig into my grandfather's financial shadow life and exile, and track his path west a few years ahead of the great Grapes of Wrath emigration. For Lucy and me, the outlines of a trip to northern California are already taking shape.

Meditation Improves Emotional Stability And Response To Stress

Feeling stressed out during the holiday season?  I am, but have found meditation a helpful buffer.  A year and half ago, my husband and I began a meditation practice, based on the approach (mindfulness-based stress reduction) developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, the Executive Director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.  Over the years, I'd read Kabat-Zinn's books, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness (Delta, 1991); Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life(Hyperion, 1994); Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness(Hyperion, 2005), and was eager to put the concepts I'd read about into action.  593 sessions in, according the Insight Timer app I downloaded, I can testify that I've experienced the heightened emotional resiliency that new research conducted by Massachusetts General Hospital has codified.

"A new study has found that participating in an 8-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating.  In their report in the November issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Boston University (BU), and several other research centers also found differences in those effects based on the specific type of meditation practiced.

"The two different types of meditation training our study participants completed yielded some differences in the response of the amygdala – a part of the brain known for decades to be important for emotion – to images with emotional content," says Gaëlle Desbordes, PhD, a research fellow at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH and at the BU Center for Computational Neuroscience and Neural Technology, corresponding author of the report.  "This is the first time that meditation training has been shown to affect emotional processing in the brain outside of a meditative state."

Several previous studies have supported the hypothesis that meditation training improves practitioners' emotional regulation.  While neuroimaging studies have found that meditation training appeared to decrease activation of the amygdala – a structure at the base of the brain that is known to have a role in processing memory and emotion – those changes were only observed while study participants were meditating.  The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that meditation training could

(read more from study)

Life is Short, So Walk Fast

The conventional wisdom is that people who choose to live in gritty, polluted, urban areas are thereby putting their health at risk. But a piece in New York magazine, “Why New Yorkers Live Longer,” effectively debunked the myth that people in cities lead any less robust lives or die younger than their country or suburban cousins.

Several factors contribute to New Yorkers living longer – AIDs deaths have declined, the homicide rate is radically lower, and the 2003 ban on smoking in public places has already reduced the number of deaths attributed to smoking by 10 percent. But among the most surprising reasons New Yorkers live longer may simply be because New Yorkers not only walk more, but also walk faster.

Eleanor Simonsick, an epidemiologist, conducted research to determine whether the speed someone walked affected overall health. According to New York Magazine, she and a group of fellow researchers “assembled 3,075 seniors in their seventies and asked them to traverse a 400-meter course, walking as fast as they could. They monitored their subjects’ health over the next six years, during which time 430 of the people died and many more fell ill.

"When Simonsick crunched the data, she found that the ones who were dying and getting sick tended to be the ones who walked the slowest. For every minute longer it took someone to complete the 400-meter (quarter mile) walk, he or she had a 29 percent higher chance of dying.”

But quantity is also important. As Clive Thompson, the author of the story, writes, “This idea of the city as a health club is fairly revolutionary.” In a study of 10,858 people living in Atlanta, Lawrence Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia, discovered that a “white man who lived in a more urban, mixed-use area was fully ten pounds lighter than a demographically identical guy who lied in a sprawling suburb.”  According to Frank, “the more you drive, the more you weigh.”

So, the next time I’m frantically rushing to my next appointment, instead of stressing, I’ll be grateful that I may be adding a few extra minutes to my life.

One Question For Seth Godin

SETH GODIN has written fourteen books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. Every one has been a bestseller. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. American Way Magazine calls him, "America's Greatest Marketer," and his blog is perhaps the most popular in the world written by a single individual. His latest book, We Are All Weird, calls for end of mass and for the beginning of offering people more choices, more interests and giving them more authority to operate in ways that reflect their own unique values, and Seth once again breaks the traditional publishing model by releasing it through The Domino Project. His recent Kickstarter for his newest book (The Icarus Deception out in January 2013) broke records for its size and the speed that it reached its goal.

As an entrepreneur, he has founded dozens of companies, most of which failed. Yoyodyne, his first internet company, was funded by Flatiron and Softbank and acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. It pioneered the use of ethical direct mail online, something Seth calls Permission Marketing. He was VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! for a year.

His latest company, Squidoo.com, is ranked among the top 125 sites in the US (by traffic) by Quantcast. It allows anyone (even you) to build a page about any topic you're passionate about. The site raises money for charity and pays royalties to its million plus members.

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

It's easy for this to become a semantic exercise (what means significant, what means risk) but for me, it was choosing to fire my company's biggest client.

At the time, I had about six employees, we were a book packager creating and selling and building book ideas, and our biggest client accounted for more than half our revenue. It was early days, the first year that I felt we might not fold at any moment.

The problem was that they ceased acting like our partner the day I ended up selling a multi-title book project for them. They thought that the project had gotten too big to share, so they became difficult. It was an organization that was already good at being difficult, one that brought a sharp pencil and little humanity to every interaction. After many months, it was clear that if we kept working with them, we would become an organization that was good at dealing with difficult clients. If we could survive this, the thinking went, then we could survive anyone.

The thing is, I didn't want to become an organization good at dealing with difficult clients.

So we gave them the project, here, take it, and we walked away, taking a huge financial loss. It was crazy.

The good news is that we were energized by our freedom and the lack of finger pointing and nastiness, and made back the lost business in less than two months.

Phew.

Run Your Family Like A Business?

  "A new generation of parents is taking solutions from the workplace and transferring them to the home.  From accountability checklists to branding sessions, the result is a bold new blueprint for family happiness."

Bruce Feiler of the Wall Street Journal reports on new approaches for navigating the tricky shoals of work-life balance.

"Like many parents, the Starrs were trapped between the smooth-running household they aspired to have and the exhausting, earsplitting one they actually lived in. "I was trying the whole 'love them and everything will work out' philosophy," she said, "but it wasn't working. 'For the love of God,' I finally said, 'I can't take this any more."  What the Starrs did next was surprising. Instead of consulting relatives or friends, they looked to David's workplace. They turned to a cutting-edge program called agile development that has rapidly spread from manufacturers in Japan to startups in Silicon Valley. It's a system of group dynamics in which workers are organized into small teams, hold daily progress sessions and weekly reviews.

As David explained, "Having weekly family meetings increased communication, improved productivity, lowered stress and made everyone much happier to be part of the family team."

Growing New Brain Cells As We Age

We’ve all seen the cartoon timeline illustrating the stages of life – you know, the one that starts with a baby crawling, then tottering around, gradually walking upright, growing tall, then, as we age, slumping over, and walking with a cane until eventually we become helpless and baby-like again. But what if that whole cycle of life thing isn’t quite right? What if we actually continue to grow, not diminish, as we age? One thing in particular caught my attention in "Inventing the Rest of our Lives," Suzanne Braun Levine’s examination of life after 50. “Recent research,” she wrote, "shows for the first time that we and adolescents – and no other age group – experience new brain growth."

Dr. Francine Benes, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, happened on the discovery of new synapses while studying schizophrenia in adolescents. According to Levine, the growth identified in Benes’ study, "takes place in the medial temporal lobe, the area that is identified with emotional learning."

"The actual new growth is in myelin, the fatty coating to nerve fibers that insulates and speeds up connections between nerve cells. This augmented brain activity plays a crucial role in helping us synthesize what experience teaches, and it enhances our ability to make considered judgment calls."

"As I see it," Levine wrote, "the same process that accounts for the transformation of impulsive and irresponsible teenagers into thoughtful adults comes back for an encore at midlife, just in time to make us even more thoughtful – dare I say wise?"

More than half a century ago, Erik Erikson identified eight major stages of our psychosocial development - and in the seventh, adult stage, he suggests that our primary motivation is toward "generativity," or a concern in guiding the next generation. How interesting to think that this psychological need to mentor might have a neurological benefit.

When a Money magazine survey of 3,000 boomers reported, "what’s in is volunteerism. Boomers already have the highest volunteer rate of any cohort in the population," I thought, of course, our need to volunteer illustrates a beneficial link between physiology, emotion and action.

I think this is really exciting. The 1960s and '70s idealism of our adolescence and young adulthood can flower again. I’m standing taller already.

Reading Now -- The New Geography of Jobs

Enrico Moretti is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.  His research is supported by the National Sciences Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and has been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

"An unprecedented redistribution of American jobs, populations, and wealth is underway, and it is likely to accelerate in the years to come.  A new map is being drawn, and it's not about red versus blue or rich versus poor.  The rise of the American brain hubs is causing huge geographic disparities in education, income, life expectancy, family stability, and political engagement.  Dealing with this split -- encouraging growth in the hubs while arresting decline elsewhere -- will be the challenge of the century."

Here are a few excerpts:

"A growing body of research suggests that cities are not just a collection of individuals but complex, interrelated environments that foster the generation of new ideas and new ways of doing business.  For example, social interactions among workers tend to generate learning opportunities that enhance innovation and productivity.  Being around smart people makes us smarter and more innovative.  By clustering near each other, innovators foster each other’s creative spirit and become more successful.  Thus, once a city attracts some innovative workers and innovative companies, its economy changes in ways that make it even more attractive to other innovators.  In the end, this is what is causing the Great Divergence among American communities, as some cities experience an increases concentration of good jobs, talent, and investment, and others are in free fall.  It is a trend that is reshaping not just our economy but our entire society in profound ways.  It implies that a growing part f inequality in America reflects not just a class divide but a geographical divide."

"We spend the best part of our lives at work.  Every morning we say goodbye to our loved ones and rush to our offices, cubicles, counter, factories, labs, or whatever place we call “work.”  For most hours of the day, for most days of the year and for most years of our lives, our best energies are dedicated to our jobs.  Our jobs have become so important that in many cases they define how people perceive us and even how we perceive ourselves.  They determine our standard of living and where we live.  For some of us, our salary and work schedule determine what sort of family we have, how many children we can afford, and how much time we spend with them.  In short, our private and collective well-being depends on what kind of jobs are out there and what security they might offer."

"The geographical sorting of individuals with different educational and income levels is likely to exacerbate the longevity differences resulting from these disparities.  The reason is simple:  poorly educated individuals who live in a community where everyone else has low levels of education are likely to adopt less healthy lifestyles than poorly educated individuals in a community where there is a mix of educational and income levels."

"At the time of the Great Migration in the 1920s, when more than 2 million African Americans abandoned the South for industrial centers in other regions, less educated individuals were more likely than others to migrate in search of better lives.  Today the opposite is true:  the more education a person has, the more mobile she is.  College graduates have the highest mobility, workers with a community college education are less mobile, high school graduates are even less, and high school dropouts come at the bottom of the list. "

Dancing People and Jumping Frogs: Earliest Animations

This Is Colossal posted an incredible set of early animations that were thrilling to see. "Nearly 155 years before CompuServe debuted the first animated gif in 1987, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau unveiled an invention called the Phenakistoscope, a device that is largely considered to be the first mechanism for true animation. The simple gadget relied on the persistence of vision principle to display the illusion of images in motion.

Via Juxtapoz:

"The phenakistoscope used a spinning disc attached vertically to a handle. Arrayed around the disc’s center were a series of drawings showing phases of the animation, and cut through it were a series of equally spaced radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images that appeared to be a single moving picture."

(to read more...)

The Beverly Oracle -- Poets and Writers Answer Our Deepest Questions

Commissioned by an NEA Arts and Cultural District Public Art Competition, "The Beverly Oracle" is a new permanent work for the Beverly Common by artist Anna Schuleit Haber, jointly hosted by the city of Beverly, Montserrat College, and Beverly Main Streets. The public art display, called the "Oracle" will consist of a single-room box in the middle of Beverly Common: four walls, a door and a ceiling.  The walls will be transparent until the viewer sits down in a chair in the room, and then they will block the view from the outside. A voice will automatically come from a speaker in the room, telling you to ask a question.

This short film is the trailer for the project's road trip to dozens of poets and writers across America in search of answers for the Oracle. Our road trip will include a forty year-old Buick "Centurion" convertible and a changing cast of co-pilots and navigators, including artists Anna Schuleit Haber, Madeleine Jennings, Caitlyn Doolittle, Katie Dygon, Finnegan, the project dog, and many others.