Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Friday, December 22, 2017

A Response to Feedback

While many of my stories thus far are from the 1980s or 1990s, for almost all of them I could tell very similar stories that happened recently. 

I've postponed some tales of recent incidents since they're more problematic to write about. In some cases, I still need to work with the people involved. For some, I might be able to make more of a difference behind the scenes, rather than making the stories public now. And for some of the recent stories, and all of the more serious incidents, I would like to distance myself from them a little more so that I can write about them in a way that's helpful and compassionate. I'm hoping that readers will stick around as I figure out how to do that!

It's interesting that some people consider the stories to be horrifying or depressing. I've mostly posted stories I find amusing; I haven't yet written about the more extreme incidents that seriously and negatively impact someone's life or career. Those are still to come!