How to Write a Resume — Part Two — What to Put in It

Posted on May 12, 2010 by This Woman Writes

Surf at Twilight -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

Okay, so you’ve got the header on your resume, describing your name, titles, and contact information. It looks great, and now there’s the small matter of filling up the empty space underneath.

For a general resume, just remember EEE — Education, Experience, and Extras, although you don’t necessarily head them this way, especially the last one. For a resume specific to an artist, you are putting in the same information, only you might divide it into headings such as Shows Entered, Representation/Galleries, Awards, Memberships/Affiliations, Collections, and so on.

If you are strong in a certain area, say Shows Entered, then showcase this; conversely, if you are not in a single Collection anywhere, then don’t worry about putting this in. Beneath the headings, arrange the information by highlighting what matters to you — if the shows are prestigious, such as International Salon of Contemporary Masterpieces, then put them in bold at the beginning of the phrase. If the venues are more impressive, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, put that first. I like to separate information by bullet points, so that an entry under the heading of Shows may look like the following:

International Salon of Contemporary Masterpieces • Dayton Museum of Art • Someplace, WY • 2010
My Thoughts (Solo Show) • Art of Excellence Gallery • Someplace, OR • 2010
Auction of the West’s Best  (23rd Annual) • New and Old Gallery • Someplace, WA • 2009

In list form, whatever is first and highlighted will jump out to the person quickly skimming over the surface.

As a sidenote, maintain consistencey by formatting all of the lines within a heading the same way. If the first line in your Shows heading lists show first, then venue, city, and date, make sure that all of the lines in that heading are ordered the same. In the next, separate heading, say Awards, you may re-arrange the order, again, as long as all of the lines within that heading are consistent.

Also, regardless of what you were told in Mrs. McClintick’s business course, there is no set order in which to put your headings, and again, if something makes you look less than sterling, then there is no reason to put it in — for example, if you have no formal training, you may elect to leave out the Education heading altogether, or within the heading, describe yourself as self-taught, auto didactic, or something of a similar nature. Remember that seminars and classes qualify as education.

Whatever is your strong point, lead with this, following with headings of subsequent strength. Your goal is to present yourself as positively, accurately, and clearly as possible, so that a person wading through a pile of papers will stop and look at yours.

Here’s an example: let’s say that you have divided your resume into four headings: Select Shows, Awards, Representation, and Education. If your show schedule is anaemic but your education is shockingly impressive, then put Education at the top and Shows at the bottom.

Resumes, like life, are fluid things, and there is a reason why we print them on paper or send them digitally as opposed to carving them in granite: things change. Many of us, when we’re first starting out, find ourselves scrabbling to find something, anything, about us or our experience that an employer would be interested in. The 16-year-old first launching into the work world lists the 4-H Livestock Show, the babysitting, and the steady paper route. The 44-year-old recently let-go middle manager does not.

An important caveat about making yourself look good: make sure that everything you list about yourself is accurate. If you taught classes in oil painting to some friends and neighbors, then you can accurately list yourself as a Private Instructor, not, however, as a Professor of Art. If a potential employer asks about a detail in your resume and you cannot describe it without stuttering and stumbling from guilt, then leave it out or rephrase it so that you can acknowledge and justify it.

Finally, in your efforts to describe yourself, feel free to go beyond the ordinary. I had a client once applying for a management position who asked me, “Do you think that I should mention that I speak and write fluent Swedish?” While Swedish is not a language generally bandied about in small-town America, it is decidedly unusual enough to attract notice, and we set up an Additional Information heading at the bottom of the resume to list some of this person’s  less conventional attributes and skills.

All of us have our quirks, and it is sometimes to our advantage to draw attention to them.

Next week: Odds and Ends.

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Facebook Friends

Posted on May 6, 2010 by This Woman Writes

Stillness -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

When I was in junior high and high school, we all kept mental tabs on the number and types of friends we had, the idea being that, the larger the number, the better person we were. Obviously, if a lot of people liked you, then you were a great person, right?

Time and experience have taught me that true friends are rare gifts indeed, and one does not get many of them throughout one’s life, and certainly not too many at one time. Logic also decrees that the human body and psyche are capable of interacting on a close level with only so many people, and that the aptly named social butterflies perform as their namesakes — flitting from one person to another and spending as much time with each as the butterfly does with individual flowers.

Frequently, such an individual defines himself as a “people person,” when in actuality he or she is just smoothly skilled at working a room. A true “people person” interacts with others on more than a superficial level, and this demands time. (People, with all of our complexities, needs, and exuberance, demand time.)

Enter Facebook.

For years I resisted, but I finally capitulated when I realized that I could, indeed, maintain contact with a variety of people throughout a busy day, keeping communication lines open that might otherwise have fused shut. That’s the good side of Facebook and its assorted cyber kin.

The bad side is that back-to-junior-high mentality of counting one’s friends. When I troll through someone’s site and see that they have 555 Facebook “Friends,” I think — how do you keep up with all of these people? And, because the number of friends is open for others to see, there is the very public pressure to add to one’s list so that one does not look pathetic. Do we ever get over the desire to be Popular?

Lately, I have come to realize that there are a lot of people who operate on the outer circumferance of my social circle (my real life, not Facebook)  — I don’t  know them very well, and, quite frankly, some of them I don’t even like. And yet, as in junior high, I find myself being concerned about what they think of me,  whether or not they are impressed by me, if I intrude into their thoughts as much as they do into mine.

And then I think, “My God, girl, it’s been more than 30 years since junior high, and you haven’t advanced beyond that? Do you even remember the people in junior high and high school who occupied so many of your thoughts?”

And I realize that, no, I can’t remember the names or faces of those people, because they weren’t my friends; they were just people milling around whose lives touched on mine remotely, and who were bothersome in their grasping demand to be noticed, to be popular, to be at the center of things.

What is amazing is that these people grew up and continued in their quest to be in the center of things, and that I have grown up and allowed them to continue to do so. The names are different, but the attitude is the same.

I remember how clusters of what we then called Preppy Girls would sit in a clump, giggling, and in this group of eight or so, only one or two were the Alpha Girls around whom the others orbited like little planets. The other day I came upon a group of six adult women, sitting in a clump giggling at a public school function, and I could clearly identify the one Alpha Mom and Beta Mom around whom the other four twittered. I imagine that if their daughters could have been pulled in from the game and set beside them, a similar pecking order would have been established.

There is nothing wrong with social butterflies, per se — we are all different, and we all interact as we see fit. The problem lies in ascribing normalcy to one type of being and abnormality to another. I am a quiet person, with a limited circle of people about whom I care very much. Around that circle is a larger one of people I know on a shallower basis and interact with on a business or aquaintanceship level.

And then there’s that outer group — the one I was so concerned about in junior high and found, to my surprise 30 years later, that it still exists. I can’t do anything about these irritating people, but I can do something about how I react to them — and just identifying the situation goes a long way in fixing it.

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How to Write a Resume, Part I

Posted on May 5, 2010 by This Woman Writes

Cascade Head -- Original Oil Painting by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art

Writing a resume doesn’t have to be a moanfully dreadful task, but it will take work and thought. Regardless of whether you are writing it for a specifically art-related event or for a job in general, the resume’s central purpose is to tell a lot about you in a minimum of space.

People reviewing the resumes generally have a stack of them to wade through — think English teachers over the weekend with student essays on What I Did This Summer — and you want to make sure that yours doesn’t get overlooked or set to the side because it is unattractive or difficult to read.

First and foremost, make sure that your name and contact information are prominently displayed on each page, generally at the top. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? It is amazing what people leave off, especially on the second page (if you are running more than a second page, then you are either an academic presenting a Curriculum Vitae, not a resume, or you are being remarkably long-winded — surely you can shorten the story and get to the punchline).

On resumes I prepare, I like to head the page with the person’s name in a larger size — around 18-24 points depending on the font — large enough so that it stands out, but not so grand that it shouts. This is the place to put titles or descriptions as well — Steve Henderson — Fine Artist, or Steve Henderson — ASMA Signature Member — anything pertinent that draws the eye and defines who and what you are.

As a personal preference, I generally place a line under the name, and below that line list as much and as varied of contact information that I can supply — some people contact exclusively by e-mail; others prefer phone; still others write; if I have no way of knowing the preferences of the selection committee, I give them everything I have.

An important caveat: when you list phone numbers, make sure that A) you have some form of answering service in case you are unable to take the call and B) no child or inarticulate grunting person will be answering that phone. With e-mail, get a new address specific to professionalism if your existing one sounds puerile or tacky, i.e., HotMamaEasyRider@yougochick.com.

Regarding what font you use, start by taking a deep breath before you peruse the options at your disposal. Always keeping  in mind that a good resume presents a lot of information in a minimum of space and is easy to read and understand, skip over the Olde English Script, beautiful as it is, and give the chiseled Egyptian hieroglyphics a toss.

Choose a maximum of two fonts: one for headings and titles, the other for text. It’s fine to get by with one, differentiating your headings and titles from the text by putting the former in bold and a larger type, but if you do opt for two distinct fonts, make sure that they are reasonably different; I like a sans serif like Arial or Franklin Gothic for my headers, and Times New Roman is my perennial favorite for text. More than two fonts starts to be too many ingredients for potato soup; it’s possible, but it can be vaguely irritating to the reader.

And remember this: there is no Resume Police, and you are no longer writing essays for Mrs. Polansky, your uptight, anal English teacher (why are they always English teachers?) who marked you down if your margin spaces weren’t just so and if you used that horrible phrase, “the fact that . . .”

Your purpose in writing the resume is not to get an A out of Mrs. Polansky’s class but to stand out in the stack — so rules are soft, but the primary unbreakable one is to make sure that everything you do contributes to your resume being easy to read and understand. If you can, say, creatively and clearly incorporate a number of fonts, by all means do so, but the difference they make in clarity and efficiency is probably minimal at best. You can spend your time more wisely by finessing what you actually say — your skills, background, experience, strengths, and abilities. 

Next week — Part II — What to Put in Your Resume

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“People Can Be So Unkind!”

Posted on April 29, 2010 by This Woman Writes

Garden Gatherings, art print from Steve Henderson Collections.

“People can be so unkind!”

The woman ahead of me in the grocery store line was large and buxom, and her overheard complaint had to do with complete strangers coming up to her and telling her how fat and unattractive she was.

“Do they think that I never look in the mirror?” she asked the sympathetic clerk. “And really, is it any of their business? And what earthly good does it do to attack me?

“People can be so unkind!”

We read a lot these days about high school girls bullying other girls, as if this were a new and growing phenomenon. Those of us old enough to remember Janis Ian’s At Seventeen realize that such mean-spiritedness has been going on for a long, long time. My 90-year-old mother remembers the caustic teasing she and her Polish farm siblings received at school because they rushed there immediately after milking the cows in the morning.

“We used to lean our heads against the cows’ flanks,” she remembered, “and as the cows had a habit of lying down on anything, including their waste, well we got stuff embedded our hair and didn’t realize it.”

Any guesses on the nicknames?

I’ve heard some propose a national day of encouragement, and it’s not a bad idea. How difficult, really, is it to walk up to someone and say that the blue of their blouse brings out the blue in their eyes?

I mean, if you were going to go up to them anyway and tell them how fat they are, is it any stretch to simply exchange one sentence for another?

In the years that I have spent staying home and raising my children, I have had the opportunity to interact with a LOT of grocery clerks, auto mechanics, dental professionals, receptionists, and just plain people in the aisles. Having been a grocery clerk myself, it didn’t take much training to learn to look the person in the eye, smile, and say Good Morning. It took one of my daughters who worked as a bagger to point out to me that the bagger is the lowliest form of life in the grocery store, and while some people smiled and thanked the checker, NOBODY noticed the bagger.

So I added that to my default mode.

At the U-bake pizza parlor, I have gotten into the habit of complimenting the pizza maker on the appearance of the pizza, especially the stuffed ones that require such dexterous twisting and shaping of the dough, as if it were a pie crust.

“What a beautiful pizza!” I always exclaim (much to the chagrin of any teenage child of mine lingering about). From the expression on the clerks’ faces (startled surprise), they must not get that comment very much. Sure, I may be the flakey blonde mom woman, but at least I took the time to tell them that what they did, they did well.

Is that so very difficult?

It’s the small things in life that add up to make the big ones. Leaving little compliments and happy thoughts strewn about not only improves the lives of those around us, but ours as well, directing our thoughts toward calmer pastures and away from the many and sundry distressing elements of day to day life.

It’s free. It’s accessible. It’s easy to do.

Go ahead. Say something encouraging to someone today. Be kind.

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Impatience Is Its Own Virtue

Posted on April 27, 2010 by This Woman Writes

The Divide, art print from Steve Henderson Collections.

Generally speaking, impatience is not considered a virtue. As a naturally, incredibly, and overwhelmingly impatient person, I spent a portion of my younger years mentally castigating myself for my aggressive, get-it-done and push-it-through way of doing things.

I should be more patient, I told myself. Gentle, thoughtful, meek, understanding, compassionate, all that sort of thing. Anything but what I was.

Then I hit 40 (how many years since that event is insignificant). There is something about a woman who hits 40 — she doesn’t care anymore about what other people expect her to be or do. She has been it and done it long enough that she knows what works and what doesn’t.

And I began to realize that — while tapping my toe and getting screamingly irritated in a long line wasn’t an effective way to control blood pressure — getting on the phone and politely confronting someone pointblank who had been dithering about the answer to my pertinent situation wasn’t such a bad thing.

Mentally reviewing a longstanding social commitment that just wasn’t working and hadn’t been for a long time, and deciding to drop it from my schedule, decreased my stress level enormously.

Analyzing a relationship and coming to the conclusion that, though Christ said to forigive another person 70 times 7 times, this did not mean that I had to actively continue to pursue a relationship with a person who literally drained my batteries — freed me to pursue deeper, healthier interactions in other directions.

In contemplating the impatient people in my life, I see a common factor — many of them are creative. They have drive, determination, energy, imagination, and, ironically, perseverence (which requires patience). One reason that they are impatient is because they are working so diligently and steadfastedly toward a goal or goals that they do not have time for non-mitigating factors and what they see as pointless hoops through which to jump.

At the same time, many of these people are learning to channel and control their impatience, recognizing that waiting is sometimes part of the game, and that things happen even when, well, things don’t seem to be happening. Their impatience propels them forward; the wisdom they have gleaned through years of being battered about in the world causes them to breathe deep and acknowledge the wait.

I have always had the impression that the intellectual Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, was an impatient man, he himself having mentioned in his writings that his inclination tended toward this direction. I am acutely aware that it is far easier to read his writings than it would have been to sit across the desk and talk to him. But in reading his works, what jumps out is his creative, engaging mind and the depth of thought and imagination behind his thoughts and words. Impatience played its part in the total package of this amazing man.

Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an unusual, quirky, difficult-to-control gift.

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Joie de Vivre is Bittersweet

Posted on April 23, 2010 by This Woman Writes

On the Verge by Steve Henderson of Steve Henderson Fine Art (click to visit website)

We just finished spring break with the College Girl, an acronym she prefers to The Middle Child. Since she has headed off to the university, the four of us remaining have settled down to a quiet, smooth-running routine, something that was shot to pieces within the first hour of her dumping the dirty clothes bag two feet from the front door.

She made pancakes for breakfast, enough for the entire week. She baked cookies, one batch using up several bags of chocolate chips. She told funny stories, gave impersonations at the dinner table of assorted personages, brought us up to speed on celebrities and movies and social networking. She was noisy and messy and loud and rambunctious and impacting. It looked like we had carpeted the bathroom floor with damp towels.

And now that she is back in school, we are back to our quiet, smooth-running routine, which this morning, although very efficient, is just a bit too quiet. I have my bathroom floor back, but, oh, I do miss my College Girl.

I would say that this Empty Nest thing is not all it’s cracked up to be, but from what I’ve heard and read, it’s generally a bittersweet thing, so yes, it is what it’s cracked up to be.

It’s great to see the birds fly, great to see them experience life with all its tumbles and weeds. It’s great to have the chocolate chips last through the month, and it’s wonderful to walk through the front door without stumbling over muddy running shoes.

But it is immeasurably sad and empty to not have that laughing, exuberant, joyful bundle of energy near enough to hug and talk to in person. During the week, I made a coffee cake that by all measurements did not rise to the occasion. The College Girl took one look at it and burst out laughing — there is something about her laugh that makes the people around want to join in, even the person holding the wretched coffee cake.

I am fortunate — I had four children in all, and not only have two still in the nest, but a grandchild nearby. Without dwelling too much on the inevitable future, I enjoy the time that we share, squeezing out of it everything I can.

But to truly get myself through, I comfort myself with the thought that someday, when we’re all in a different place, we’ll be there forever, together, and we won’t ever have to say good-bye (while I find this a comfort, perhaps my children find it a daunting proposition; ah, well, I’ll always be their mom). Whether or not other people share this belief doesn’t matter to me; whether or not someone chooses to say I’m relying on a crutch or right on doesn’t matter to me; it’s where I am, it’s what I believe, and it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning and through the day.

I don’t know what Heaven’s like; none of us do. But one thing I do know — it’s a place where you never have to say Good-bye.

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Is Common Courtesy Still Common?

Posted on April 22, 2010 by This Woman Writes

The other day I was at a small business, attempting to pay for my purchase. I say “attempting” because, even though I was at the front counter, items neatly stacked and checkbook to the ready, the sales associate was so deep in conversation with her granddaughter that I was an obvious nuisance.

“Oh, hello,” she managed to fling my direction midway through totting up my purchases. Then back to the slouching granddaughter and the discussion of that evening’s public school sports program — “at 5 p.m., no less, when most people should be eating supper and not sitting in uncomfortable folding chairs.”

While I agree with the woman’s assessment of the establishment’s insensitivity to people’s lives, I also take umbrage with people who are supposed to be running businesses treating their customers — me, in this case — like side dishes.

As a seamstress, quilter, and knitter, I frequent a lot of intimately cozy fabric and fiber shops, and they run the gamut on how friendly and open they are. I will never forget my experience at a shop where I went to buy fabric for a woman who had lost her entire stash (as well as everything else) in a fire. The proprietress looked me up and down and said, “I know the kind of quilts that you make, and I can assure you that (the unfortunate woman’s) taste is far beyond yours. I don’t think anything that would appeal to you would appeal to her.”

Wow. Face slap. It reminded me of the scene in Runaway Bride when the plumply sweet bridal dress shop owner tells Julia Robert’s character, “Oh, that’s not a dress for someone like you, dear.” The main difference is that the movie character was an imaginary one, while my retail associate from hell was all too real.

On the other end, our local Happy Yarn Shoppe is a paradigm for how to run a business. Every customer is greeted as an old friend; multiple customers are all interacted with and made to feel special — months later as Jacci was showing me some yarn she commented, “This is the same yarn that you used to make your granddaughter that adorable sweater with the Beatrix Potter buttons on it.” She remembers that the lady out East likes a particular sock yarn brand; another woman from Oregon swears by a certain wool blend; I go nuts over anything made out of the underbelly hair of a camel.

Is it so amazing that I practically live at the Happy Yarn Shoppe?

My teen years were spent as a retail sales associate, only back then the term was “grocery checker.” Repeatedly, my boss told me, “This is a small store, and I can’t compete with the big guys on prices. But I can pummel them in the kindness and courtesty department. When you are with a customer, you are with that customer — not the one coming up, not the one you just checked out, and most certainly not your friends who had better not drop by to ‘visit,’ but that one right-in-front-of-you customer, and he or she is presently the most important person in your existence. Make people feel that way, and they’ll keep coming back. That’s what Customer Service means.”

Wise words from a former Los Angeles policeman who worked nights and studied days so that he could achieve his dream of owning a successful grocery store in a small, rural town.

As a family, we make a point of frequenting small, individually owned businesses — as long as they reciprocate and treat us with respect and, dare I say, pleasure — because the process of buying and selling can indeed be a pleasurable, social one for both parties.

Human interaction. It’s worth the time.

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