I've never been in love which maybe is why I love my friends with violent tenderness. It is a gift to have healthy places to channel the ache. This I realized after my neighborhood friend J. texted me last week:
Time has been a beautiful gift to us over the years.
Timing did a cruel thing to a number of my friendships in the past years and it healed me to read and recognize that line.
Anyhow - have also been thinking about the writing. The business pieces, the poetry, this newsletter. Currently it only happens in the margins of life and I wish it didn't have to be that way. I have a lot to say to y'all but it will wait. (Don't ask me about Olivia Rodrigo. The feelings are mixed.)
Today:
a new piece on how culture is fermented
a new campaign for work based on yes, The Office, enabled by the first time I've ever used chatgpt for work
a 4-part excerpt from BLOOMER, assuming most of y'all haven't seen it yet because nobody likes to click > poems.vickygu.com
shirts & prints from my screenprinting class. subscribers send me your addy to redeem your print <3
How content excels with creative organizational design
Last week I mentioned to a new friend how my work is not about content; it's culture. He replied that culture is an ocean, and recommended to not go against the tides.
Well I’ve never felt a part of the culture of any institution I've been involved with. So it comes down to: either I leave, or I invest where I can make a difference. Because usually riding the tide makes me want to throw up.
A couple excerpts from the piece:
The last thing I assume is that colleagues intuit the value of content and brand. On the same day, I've received these two very different sentiments from colleagues in engineering and operations teams:
"I used to think brand was a dumb investment, but now I think it's the best investment we've ever made."
"What does brand even contribute to growth? We need growth more than we need brand."I use two core methods to increase understanding when presented with the latter statement...
As my friend Behzod Sirjani said about his time running research at orgs like Facebook and Slack, "Our job is not to be product police; it's to build a practice of learning." With organizational design, I like to think about it as building a practice of collective writing.
Thanks to Wye Coday and Deb Carver for the edits!
For work I made The Office, but for enterprise B2B researchers. Big shout to our designer Lori Bacich for visuals that went above and beyond my dreams. Thanks to Behzod, Jason Talwar, and Matt Harris for consulting on feasibility… :)
If you're in content, you know that chatgpt does shit for original content that actually moves hearts, even when much of the internet is deluded otherwise. (Statistics, yunno.)
That said, this campaign was the first time I've ever used chatgpt for work. I laid out my research and outlined the character and episode guides in Figjam, then asked chatgpt to turn my orig inputs into a screenplay structure. The jokes were terrible and I mostly scrapped what it spit out, but it did make the process quicker.
Below, selects from my first audio/visual poetry collection BLOOMER. These four poems travel earth garden > hell garden > heaven garden > back to earth garden. Head to poems.vickygu.com to hear the sound I made + production commentary.
devil of the garden
you prune out last year’s overgrowth, the toxic petals - who planted those anyways? - and the weeds, methodically tearing the roots that have overstayed their welcome, until you meet the one that resists your touch - the devil of the garden - annoyed, you go to the hardware store and get a weed whacker and come back and bring the blade deliciously close to the interloper, but why do you stop and wonder - which is more merciful, to let it live or die? why do i feel the decision is not mine?
queen of the dark
the pond had two swans until one killed the other—beaked him to death, was the gossip of the garden. i always thought they were less than lovers but more than companions. turns out there's only room for one queen in paradise.
after hours is when the lions come out—they're harmless if you bow before you stroke them, no room for someone else's god here. don't fret if your fingers start burning at the touch, that's what counterfeit glory does. also don't just stand there appalled, this is not how you imagined to go! shit, where's the emergency exit back up to earth?
follow the tiger lily lined road until you reach the heart of stone, pick it up and pocket it until you have money for a transplant, spin around three times and say, go! jinx, your kid tricks don't work here—you can only run & run & run & run until the dawn breaks
lily of the peak
you run & run & run until it makes no more sense—when did the road turn to cloud? when did the stone turn to heart? how did the dark turn to gold?
behold, before you lies the garden that is at once sun and cloud and moon and sea, complete with your favorite water lilies, how did he know? you sit on an errant lily pad and the waves whisper at you, what are you doing here? heaven is for the dead, not the sad—go home, love
and the next breaker pushes you over the ledge
daughter of the sea
you fall down and land in your garden where the damn weed still stands, still too arresting and fearful to touch, so you give it the side eye, ask lightning to strike it from your garden—but the skies are not yours to command, after all you are a daughter of the sea—and smothering it with water seems too cruel of an ending, even for the devil, so instead you surround it with irrigation, lay down your finest engineering—are you insane? likely but you cannot resent the weed, only feed it until mother ocean calls you back to the deep—to wait for the growth that is not yours to watch, only trust
This past month I took a screenprinting class! Made a small batch run of shirts and prints for friends and family. Analog always feels good. Paid subscribers, reply with your address if you'd like an exclusive print. :)
love always,
v
So lovely to receive your words in my inbox 💛