Part Two: Behind the Screen of "Greetings from Kenosha"

If you stand on the corner of 56th Street and 6th Avenue in downtown Kenosha, the street signs only tell part of the story. Long before any code was written or pages were filled, I learned that for me, wandering was writing—that every step taken through the city's changing landscape was directly shaping my creative process.

To your left, the weathered industrial brick of a century-old factory town survives. To your right, the morning light hits the fresh steel of new construction. I walk these blocks every morning. I listen to the lake wind cut through the street grid and watch the colors shift against the shoreline. In my last post, I talked about how wandering these sidewalks with an iPhone turned into the starting point for a new project. Here's what happened when I sat down at the keyboard to actually build it.

A view through the window on the top floor of the Karrick in downtown Kenosha.

Making an interactive map was just like plotting a novel—mostly false starts and dead ends. I knew the stories I wanted to tell, but keeping them organized without the whole thing falling apart was exhausting. There were weeks I almost gave up. I had to teach myself just enough code to keep the interface from breaking.

Architectural scaffolding: I spent weeks locked inside the Antigravity development environment.

If you’ve ever been stuck in the middle of a messy manuscript, you know how unglamorous it is. It’s not romantic inspiration; it’s just brute-force organization. Instead of wrestling with physical binders, I was dealing with thousands of invisible files: vector graphics, archival research folders, and daily photos—all trapped inside one machine.

Digital anchor: I built the visual interactive map because I needed a way to harness and organize that digital chaos.

It looks pretty tidy, but click on any of those files, and a spiderweb of data will spew forth!

Antigravity forced me to engineer a rigid physical structure for my workspace. I anchored the master file directly on the desktop and nested the necessary subfolders securely beneath it. It looks perfectly tidy on the surface. Click that main folder, and the subfolders spill out. It works exactly like pulling open a heavy book cover to reveal the chaotic stories hiding inside.

This interface used to terrify me, sort of like the idea of writing my first novel. And now, when I look at it, I see the bones and the structure that supports something truly amazing!

I did not want a flat blog index where old essays decay under new timestamps. The map turned into a living table of contents that grew as I learned more about the town. Click a pin, and a vintage postcard pops up. Click the card, and it flips over with a sharp click to reveal field notes, audio clips, and history. It is a continuous loop of discovery. You pull the reader in, give them a piece of art, and then drop them directly into the history.

Living table of contents: The map became a dynamic visual spine that expands as my understanding of this footprint deepens.

When an explorer enters the map, they are presented with a collection of map pins that they can choose.

Here is the truth I want to leave with fellow writers. You do not need to write a line of code or build a custom web interface to steal this concept for your own work. The tool does not matter. Your visual table of contents might be an oversized corkboard pinned with index cards and thick yarn. It might be a dedicated sketchbook filled with hand-drawn floor plans or a nested digital folder of character dossiers.

What matters is the physical act of pinning your world down in space. When you build a dedicated container for your curiosity, you force your research, your setting, and your narrative arcs to talk to one another on the same plane. It gives your story a bedrock to stand on. It ensures you understand the world before you ask a reader to step inside.

What does your visual table of contents look like? How do you map the architecture of your stories when the draft gets messy?

If this project intrigues you, tap on the logo and explore the Greetings from Kenosha Project. Maybe it will inspire your next project!

My Week Without Social Media: Or, Why I'm Not Nearly As Important As I Think I Am!

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of chaperoning a mission trip with high school students from Kenosha’s St. Mary’s Lutheran Church and Spirit Alive Church.  37 of us loaded up in three huge vans and one Chevy Traverse and headed to Detroit.  We were blessed to use Hope Lutheran Church in Farmington Hills, MI as our base camp.

While in Detroit, we spent the bulk of our time supporting the Matrix Center.  This centrally located building is an oasis in the Osborne Neighborhood, just a few miles on the edge of Detroit.  We cleared vacant lots, did landscaping, painting and a whole host of other projects that the busy staff just never had the time to do. The hot temperatures made outdoor work challenging.  The intense summer sun and heat pushed us all to our limits.  Still, the trip was fantastic in every respect.  While I enjoyed the hard work, I also enjoyed the mental vacation from social media.

Image courtesy Victoria Fields.

We had asked the youth to limit their phone use.  We wanted them to ‘be in the moment’ that seems to develop when folks are not forever looking down at their tiny screens.  They rose to the occasion.  It seemed only fair that if I was asking them to step back, that I should do the same.  I added ‘vacation responders’ to all my email accounts, professed to the social media world that I was taking a break from it.

While I hardly ever have my phone’s volume up, I noticed the ‘notifications’ popping up on my screen over the directions app. almost immediately.  When we stopped, I was tempted to ‘just check’ on those emails or that funny tweet that popped up.  I knew I was going to have to do something drastic.  In fact, when I told my 18-year-old daughter what I had done, she let out an audible gasp.  I deleted ALL of the social media apps from my phone.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Facebook Messenger.  I even deleted my email accounts.  Besides the camera and photography apps, my iPhone was basically, and somewhat ironically, a phone.  The chaperones were using a group text to keep in touch between vans and occasionally we had to place a random call, so I left those two apps intact.  Almost immediately I felt the relief, but also a bit of anxiety.  The word ‘addiction’ gets thrown around pretty loosely.  I don’t think I’m addicted to the phone, but I have been conditioned to pick it up every time it vibrates, ‘just to check.’

One of the many beautiful art pieces at Hope Lutheran Church in Farmington, MI.

Why did I delete the apps?  Mostly because I have so little self-control; I'm just being totally honest.  I knew that if they were on the phone, I would look.  At first, just, a peek, but soon  full-fledged minutes would turn into hours and so on.  Why not just re-load them?  Well, that’s a good idea, but that would have taken time and by the time I had the ‘need’ to check notifications, the need had passed.  So, I embraced the void.  I figured if something earth shattering happened, I would find out soon enough.  I might even just get a phone call.  Remember those?

The soaring sanctuary of Hope Lutheran Church in Farmington, MI.

Unfortunately, some horrible events DID in fact happen.  There was an attack in France and shortly thereafter there was another shooting of police officers.  We were alerted to the possibility of violence in major cities across America following these shootings.  I had told the other leaders about my social media ‘fast’ and they were monitoring events.  We shared the bare bones of the events with the students that evening as we gathered.  Seeing their faces reminded me how we ‘used’ to get bad news.  Because we were all essentially processing it together, we had time to reflect, cry and pray.  I think we miss much of this in our 24/7 connected world.  By the time one event hits the news cycle there is another event happening.  We don’t’ have time in this ‘modern’ world to grieve.

The baptismal font is large and centrally located at the Hope Lutheran Church in Farmington, MI.

As the week wore on, I noticed that I didn’t even really miss the facebook updates or countless photos of friend's children or vacation images.  In fact, I actually found time to read.  Not as much as I would have liked to, but given the fact that I had 34 noisy teenagers around me all of the time, that I read at all is a miracle!

Detail of a building at the Heidelberg Project in Detroit.

I won’t lie. I was very anxious to re-load the apps and check in with my social media accounts.  Somewhat disappointedly, I must say that nobody ‘needed’ me.  Nobody offered me a book deal, that part in the new action film, nor had I won any lotteries.  In fact, there actually very few emails or updates on my accounts.  I’d like to think that it was because I told everyone I was offline, but I think that the actual reason is that I’m just not as important as I would like to think I am.  I say that not in a disparaging way, but in an honest and humble way.  The world will turn.  The sun will rise.  All without me.

One of the structures at the Heidelberg Project in Detroit.

And yet, despite the fact that I wasn’t ‘missed’ on social media, I made memories that I will never forget; even if I didn’t document them with a tweet, gram or post.  You could say I got to time travel because I saw the ‘future’ in the faces of the youth.  I spent countless hours with them singing, praying, working and sweating.  The future is indeed bright!

The General Motors Building in Downtown Detroit, MI.

How can you manage your social media ‘addiction?’  Well,  Ibrahim Husain’s POST on Lifehack has some fantastic tips, a couple I would like to highlight.  First, he states that you have to acknowledge you have a problem.  Use one of the many trackers to monitor your use.  MOMENT is one of the best in my opinion.  It literally tracks every time you pick your phone up and seeing those statistics can be quite sobering.  After you acknowledge this, you can start working to curb your addiction.  Husain suggests deleting many of the apps from your phone, permanently.  Do you really need Facebook and Twitter on your phone?  I personally have found that using an interface like TweetDeck helps me efficiently monitor and learn from my Twitter feed.  I haven’t found anything similarly for Facebook.  For now, I’m limiting myself to it by using a timer.  

The beautiful organ at Hope Lutheran Church in Farmingham, MI.

I DID make a few changes as I re-loaded those apps back to my phone.  The first is that I turned off ALL notifications except a few key apps (text messaging and calendars).  I will NOT get notifications of new tweets, or posts to Instagram and Facebook.  I won’t even get notifications of email messages. I am sure I’ll miss a few emails late at night or early in the morning.  I apologize in advance to you if that happens. (Three weeks on, I've really enjoyed not seeing those messages on my screen.  It takes a little discipline to 'remember' to check the messages, emails, etc. but that is a much healthier 'problem' than being a slave to the notices.) Who knows, hopefully, I’ll find some time to let my mind drift; it is in that kind of moments I find I do my best thinking.  Maybe my monumental stack of books next to my bed will gradually shrink!  One thing is for sure, my week without social media has had a powerful impact on me.  Give it a try!

The whole crew gathered along the river walk in Detroit, MI.