Jessica Lipnack is a writer whose non-fiction work has led to a career as a management consultant. As CEO and co-founder of NetAge, she provides advice, education, and ideas on virtual teams, collaboration, and networking. She is the co-author, with Jeff Stamps, of six non-fiction books on these subjects, including Virtual Teams, Networking, and The Age of the Network. She has written articles and op-ed pieces for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Seattle-Post Intelligencer, Harvard Business Review, The Industry Standard, and more. As a fiction writer and essayist, Jessica’s work has appeared in Ars Medica, the Global City Review, Mothering, The Futurist, and New Age Journal, where she served as contributing editor for many years. Jessica lives in Massachusetts with her husband. For more information, visit her website and blog.

You started out writing articles and other non-fiction pieces for newspapers and magazines. When and how did you become interested in writing fiction?

I was hired as a reporter for my hometown newspaper when I was sixteen. That summer or the next, I started a novel that was supposed to be a comedy about life in my small town. I’d write after coming home from the paper (worked 3-11 for three summers; 4:30-1:30 for the last). It was a comedy — but I don’t think I got past about thirty pages. Wrote some short stories in high school — and poetry — and maybe even a play or at least I thought hard about one — and was an editor on our school paper.

My father died suddenly during my junior year of high school, as did Kennedy, our school librarian, my close friend’s mother, and our favorite teacher’s wife. Ten years later I wrote the first draft of “The Club,” a story about that year, which I’ve revised, renamed, recharactered, rechronologized, and still haven’t published. Many stories have popped out of that one. After giving birth to our first daughter, I wrote “One Birth, Many Births,” creative nonfiction in today’s jargon, which a fine agent represented to fourteen publishers. No go, but out of that came Networking. Wrote several children’s books while kids were little, more short stories, and published five more nonfiction books. Recently finished a novel, “The Persuasion.”

So fiction has always been in the picture, and in a prominent way. You’re more heavily published in non-fiction, but would you say fiction is your passion?

Writing is the passion. I get very lost in it, even writing this email. Word by word, to paraphrase Ms. Lamott. So I could be ecstatic having finished a blog post about, well, lavender in my garden or a clever thing a colleague said or a cool thing that happened in a meeting…or move on to nirvana, as you’re guessing, when writing up a whole world (fiction). The first character I watched rise from the page (screen) startled me and hooked me on releasing more of them. But…in the end, a good nonfiction piece does that too. You see the characters, hear how they speak, understand what complications they’re resolving, and, in the best, come away in a different place from when you began reading. Example: Geraldine Brooks’s New Yorker piece, “The Book of Exodus,” about the Sarajevo Haggadah, which was spectacular. She also wrote a novel about it: The People of the Book. Or Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind. Her portrait of Nobel Laureate John Nash was so rich that Russell Crowe got an Oscar for playing Nash. [Disclosure: Sylvia was my college roommate.]

How you got your start in writing professionally is an interesting story. Tell us more about getting hired on with your local newspaper at age 16. Before this moment, did you know writing was your calling?

I knew when I was six. I was born in a small Pennsylvania factory town to parents who’d moved there from Brooklyn in their late thirties. We lived on the same street as Shandy Hill, the publisher of The Pottstown Mercury. A small daily like the one he ran was hungry for material. Thus, there was a column devoted to breaking news like first-grade birthday parties, which was how I got my first byline. I still feel guilty because I didn’t write the article by myself. It was a class project and I got the credit because Mr. Hill liked me.

So fast forward ten years, and I’m turning sixteen. I write to Mr. Hill, saying that I’m looking for a job on the newspaper. He writes back immediately: “You’re too young, little girl.” And the next day, I get another letter: “Oh, gee, we need you after all.”

Turned out that the woman who wrote up the weddings and funerals needed “a female operation.” He asked me to fill in for six weeks. Once I was there, Mr. Hill gave me other assignments. Mostly he yelled at me and told me all the mistakes I was making but I loved it, wrote six, seven, sometimes eight stories a day. Gripping topics: Lower Perkiomen Township Supervisors Meeting; Band concert in the park; Interviewing Miss Pennsylvania and Miss Pottstown Sesquicentennial — together (photo attached). One night (I think it was July 4th) only one other reporter came in — usually there were about half a dozen, all much older than I, all men — and we had to write all the stories ourselves. I learned to write different kinds of pieces. When I traveled, I wrote columns; one summer, I wrote the “Dear Beatrice” advice column. And I had a very tough editor in Bob Boyle, whose way of teaching was to tease me about my poor spelling (which remains bad), poor grammar, bad fact-checking. I wrote all of this into “Sting and I,” a story that I haven’t published.

After working at your local paper, you went on to write features, columns, profiles, and more, for publications like the New Age Journal, Mother Earth News, and the Boston Globe. When did that transition take place? Were you freelance or on staff?

I worked at the paper during summers of high school and before my third year of college. After graduating from Antioch College in 1970, I freelanced for Boston After Dark and for various “underground” papers of the time. I was never on staff for any publication but continued to publish pieces in these and other places. I wrote whatever I could, including writing for Addison-Wesley, the publisher, where I contributed to an American history textbook (wrote feature stories to make the book more contemporary). Around 1974, I started writing for New Age Journal, which I did monthly for a very long time. Wrote everything imaginable — from cover stories to movie reviews to essays to interviews to book reviews … whatever came to mind that the editor liked. At some point, I wrote a natural foods breakfast cookbook for Mother Earth News, among other odd writing adventures.

A natural foods breakfast cookbook. That sounds cool. Did you invent and write your own recipes? Is it still available for purchase?

I probably have a copy somewhere but it disappeared into the great maw of one of Mother Earth News’s gambits. For a while, they ran courses around the country and somehow (it involved auditioning in a sketchy Holiday Inn near the Boston airport) I applied and got the job to write the cookbook, along with a curriculum for training teachers who would deliver the course, along with the cookbook. Writers will do anything, apparently. At least this writer. I did indeed invent the recipes — and later taught my own course on natural foods cooking for the community education program in Newton, Massachusetts, where I live.

When did you start writing about Virtual Teams and the “Net Age”?

After the gazillionth rejection of “One Birth, Many Births,” which Ron Bernstein, my agent at the time, couldn’t understand because he loved the book, I went to New York to meet with him. He went to his shelf and pulled off a book. “You should write something like this,” he said. The book was Passages by Gail Sheehy, a very popular nonfiction book at the time about women’s development, very little written about until that point. I laughed because this is akin to saying to someone today, “You should write something like The Tipping Point.” As if you could just make that happen. His next idea was a bit more practical. He suggested I write a book about women’s networks. When I told my husband about Ron’s idea, Jeff said, “Why don’t we write a book together about networks?” And so I wrote a four-page proposal, no sample chapter, no chapter outline, just four pages, and Ron was able to interest six publishers; within a month, we agreed to a contract with the British publisher, Methuen, which was launching its first US list. Methuen’s American publisher was a very famous guy in publishing who mentioned the book in an interview in The New York Times Book Review as one of his promising titles. So we had high hopes! Then suddenly Methuen cancelled its whole US list! Ron being Ron quickly resold the book to Doubleday and it was published as Networking in 1982. (In 1984, that book was published in Japan by the Japanese Economic Planning Council, where it sold very well.) In 1986, Routledge and Kegan Paul, the British publisher, contacted us and asked for a revision of the 1982 book, which came out in ‘86 as The Networking Book, which was republished in the US by Viking Penguin. In 1993, we published The TeamNet Factor with another talented figure in publishing, Jim Childs, who was then running a small press in Vermont. We did two more books with Jim, The Age of the Network in 1994 and the first edition of Virtual Teams in 1997, during which time Jim had moved to head up Professional and Trade books at Wiley, where we published a complete revision of Virtual Teams in 2000.

What kind of networks, exactly? Business? Personal? Were you educated, or otherwise experienced, in this field?

The first book, Networking, was about nonprofit, grassroots people networks — why they form, how they function, how they are led, what their values and principles are. We did the research by writing to one person whom we knew to be a prodigious networker, Bob Smith, a federal historian at NASA, asking him for suggestions of people interested in networks and networking. He sent us nine names; we wrote to those people; six wrote back, sending us more names, and within eighteen months, we received the names of 50,000 people around the world participating in networks. We wrote to 4000 of them and an astonishing 40% (1600) wrote back. (Incredible in retrospect, but just a huge amount of work at the time. I gave birth to our second daughter two weeks after signing the book contract.)

You ask if I (or by implication, Jeff) was educated or experienced in this field. Yes, but not in traditional ways. I was twenty years old in 1968, the height of The Sixties. All of us learned how to form new organizations then, learned how to network. With me, it really stuck, e.g. my blog’s name is Endless Knots. And Jeff had just finished his PhD in human systems theory when we started the book so he was already thinking about systems and structures. But neither of us had written a book for commercial publication before — or gathered that much disparate information and tried to make sense of it in such a short time. In that way, it was on-the-job training.

Even though Networking was about groups on the fringes of society, the response came primarily from the mainstream — big companies, big governments, big denominations. We were astonished when Prudential Insurance, Digital Equipment Corporation, the Japanese government, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and The United Nations called for advice. And that was how we became management consultants. Engagements with these kinds of institutions provided experience and stories that resulted in five more books.

One side-note: We did receive many letters, calls, and visits from grassroots people all around the world who read Networking. One touching letter came from a nun in the US who said she kept the book on her night table for inspiration. Robert Muller, who was an Assistant Secretary at the UN, wrote us a poem called “Decide to Network,” and the great design scientist Bucky Fuller (of the geodesic dome and for whom the buckminsterfullerene family of molecules is named) wrote a foreword.

These books were written in collaboration with your husband. You two must work well together!

Perfectly. Without the slightest wrinkle. Seamlessly. Never a harsh word.

I was just wondering when you’d ask. We’ve grown up together — he was twenty-three and I was twenty when we met, which means, in short, that the first couple of books were very difficult. We had screaming arguments over whether we should use the word “node” or “people” to describe one aspect of networks. (Wait. We just had that argument again last week . I think he won.) At a certain point, maybe two or three books into it, we grew up enough to realize that the precise words weren’t that important, that unless an idea had been perverted by the other, it wasn’t worth the battle. Now we don’t even really discuss changes. We just pass the manuscripts back and forth, make changes — and then if necessary talk about it.

I read that you’ve been online since 1979. I didn’t even know the internet was around in 1979! It was the 90’s, and I was in college, when I first logged on.

It’s true. Jeff and I were among the couple of hundred people on EIES, one of the first online discussion systems, joining in 1979, when going online was a deft trick, requiring perfect timing (i.e. you had the slam the phone receiver into an acoustic coupler fast enough to make the connection) and a large pocketbook as in it cost $25 AN HOUR to connect. I’ve been online ever since, duck to water and all that.

In 1995, I got a call from Newsweek saying they were trying to find the oldest woman online and they heard I might be one of them. I was 47 and suggested that they call Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who had a few years, if not decades, on me. She was responsible for developing a key software breakthrough. Ce n’est pas moi. I am not a computer scientist or even a lowly geek. Just a lover of communication, the faster the better.

A lot of kids are now growing up online. They play games online, do research online, talk online. In many ways, it seems like their entire lives are online. (Disclosure: To a large extent, so is mine.) What do you think the consequences are of growing up in this sort of non-reality?

I don’t know. And I don’t know if this is non-reality. It certainly feels real, sitting here at my computer, writing to you, who will read this perhaps a few minutes from now, perhaps tomorrow. It’s still reality even if it isn’t real-time. But…I worry about kids because the problems they will one day contend with are not just manufactured by games or the fact that their machines keep crashing while they’re in Second Life. Most of the world is not online; most children certainly aren’t; and the huge issues that remain unsolved for the world to survive and evolve are not going to be addressed by Twitter alone. All this technology will help, is essential, in fact, but the truly difficult negotiations required to disarm rogue nations or non-state actors, to massively distribute life-saving medications/immunizations, to build the infrastructure required to maintain life, feed, clothe, and educate nearly seven billion people are not going to happen on MySpace or Facebook alone. I stress the alone part because I do believe all of these technologies are positive contributors to a more healthy world, just highly misused by people with little self-control (myself included, as my family and friends will attest).

Let’s switch gears and talk about your short fiction. What’s your style?

As my older daughter said when she was two, “It all capends.” The material dictates the style. I write satire, which is wry and, as one reader said, “mugging for the camera;” sober, which another reader said reads like Hemingway, with simple sentences, few modifiers; lyrical, which fits the literary mold, more poetic, where the melody of the words carries the piece; and, in the case of the children’s books, rhyme, which I love. The consistent criticism I’ve received that I’ve worked hard to remedy is that I can hold too close to facts. Must be my reporter training. So I’ve been trying hard to shake off any connection to reality…speaking of which…

You have mentioned several short stories based on your life experiences that you’ve yet to publish. Have you found it easier to publish fiction further removed from fact?

Actually, not. The fiction I’ve published is closer to “faction.” Maybe I should try submitting more of the “further removed” stuff.

Can you tell us about your novel “The Persuasion,” and the trilogy it’s a part of?

Gladly. “The Persuasion” is the first book in the “Woman in the 21st Century” trilogy. I’ve been fascinated by the nineteenth-century writer, Margaret Fuller, since I was young (have written articles about her and wrote a treatment for a film script shortly after discovering her). Fuller was breaking ceilings when they were still solid granite. Without formal education (ahem, not available to women living in “Young America,” as the writers of that period were known), she became, in my view, the most prolific writer of the 1840s, while supporting her family. When she was thirty-three, she wrote an essay about woman’s potential for the literary magazine that she edited, The Dial, the same journal that brought fame to her friends, Emerson and Thoreau. In 1845, her treatise was published separately as a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Shortly thereafter, she added more firsts to her bio (already the first woman in America to have a Page-One byline), she became the first American woman to file reports as a foreign correspondent when she traveled to Europe and ended up covering the Roman Revolution of 1848. Tragically, she was killed in a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, New York, as she was returning to America with her husband and little son. She was barely forty years old.

So…the premise of the first volume, “The Persuasion,” is this: More than a century after her premature death, the ghost of Margaret Fuller, the nineteenth-century phenome, interrupts the life of aspiring journalist Mariana Muller. Margaret’s motive? She wants Mariana to rewrite her classic treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, for modern times. Beginning in 1968, the novel follows Mariana as she ducks the ghost’s entreaties, falls for and starts a new life with Tonin, the heir to a Czech fortune, and pursues becoming a writer. Together, Mariana and Tonin settle in Massachusetts where, in 1973, they co-found an institute for the future with a group of friends, several of whom are followers of Bucky Fuller’s work (yes, Bucky is the grand-nephew of Margaret). It takes giving birth to twins, organizing and producing a conference for a thousand guests, and a mystical moment in a starry meadow with Bucky and “Margaret” to persuade Mariana to write “Woman in the 21st Century.”

In the second volume (working title, “Man and Woman”), which I’m wrestling with now, Margaret as apparition and Mariana as real woman actually write the book, even as Mariana and her husband raise five children and confront a series of difficult circumstances, including Mariana’s continuing disbelief that it’s possible to communicate across the divide of life and death. The third volume, untitled, is about the effect of the book’s publication on world events. Big themes and all that.

Wow. There are a lot of “networks” within this novel, as well! Perhaps this is the “secret,” or “meaning,” to life—creating and maintaining connections.

Guilty as charged. Writerly response first: Some years ago, I realized that some of my “ideas” might be better communicated in fiction. “Night Shift,” a short story that was published in Mothering, was about mothers of babies establishing a middle-of-the-night global network — because they were all wide awake at 3 AM. The novel is optimistic, which in difficult times, is perhaps more palatable in fiction than in nonfiction (never mind harder to prove in a genre that demands at least a few facts). But until you put it this way, I hadn’t explicitly recognized that there are a lot of “networks” embedded in the novel. Now the humanity response: when I give presentations with slides, I usually close with one titled “Only Connect,” inspired by Mr. Forster. There’s a lot of science to prove that connections make for healthier lives — and a recent study strongly suggests that cancer patients who blog do better. I have no data to prove it but I am a lot happier, more productive, and probably more loving to those around me when I’m connecting, which is why I write.

You’re an experienced and prolific writer, Jessica. Do you have any advice for writers who are looking to wade deep into the field, such as you have?

First, the basic advice. Write, write, and write some more. Never stop. Every time you touch a keyboard or pick up a pen, you have the opportunity to perfect your writing — even if it’s a note to your kid’s teacher. I remember one note that my mother wrote, excusing me from school. She said I was “suffering from dysmenorrhea.” (Made me go to the dictionary — and question whether it was a good idea for her to be so frank . My mother was not a writer but she was an English teacher so she was always throwing words in my way. (Note to parents: if your kid wants to write, major assist recommended. My mother bought me a manual typewriter when I was ten.)

Second, don’t be precious. There’s nothing wrong with writing for your local neighborhood newsletter or town newspaper or, now, your own blog. These are great practice fields. The blog aside, writing for venues where there are editors makes you comfortable with the editing process — and with waiting, the great virtue of fine writers. You can’t be impatient as a writer or you’ll go mad. Everything takes longer than forever. Submit to an agent and you’re lucky if you get a response in a month… I could spell this out but most people reading this know how excruciatingly long the publishing process actually is.

Third, forget about being published. This is the most difficult one. Since I’ve been published a lot, you might be thinking that it’s easy for me to say. But I too have work that I absolutely love, that I deeply want others to read, that hasn’t been published.

Fourth, in the spirit of contradiction, never stop trying to be published. About a year ago, I received an email from Roland Merullo (who suffered through eight or nine years before Leaving Losapas, his first novel was published) after what felt like a crushing rejection from an agent: “I have a picture of Rocky Marciano on my wall,” he wrote, “the only undefeated heavyweight champ–not Ali, not Foreman, not Tyson, the only–and what did he have going for him? Not size, not talent, but a simple refusal to give up. I think there are times when it’s smart to give up, but not for you, not now, not with this book.” I agree in principle with what Roland is saying. Oooops, I better send some more queries.

Last thought: Kelly, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to be part of your series and for giving me the impetus to reflect on why I write.

Contact Jessica: jessica.lipnack AT netage DOT com

Read:

“Feeling Numb”
published in Ars Medica

“Endless Knots”
published in Global City Review

Letter to the Editor
in the New Yorker

“When Face Time Is a Matter of Life and Death”
published in The Industry Standard

“A Geek Doctor Takes a 2.0 Approach to Healthcare Technology”
published in The Industry Standard

“The Social General”
published in The Industry Standard