The Good Men Project - Call for Bloggers: A Conversation About Men

Do you care about men? Do you want to help create the conversation about how men are or can redefine masculinity for the 21st Century? The the Good Men Project is looking for you - whether you are XX, XY or one of the many variations is not relevant.

Call for Bloggers: A Conversation About Men

October 26, 2013 by the Editors

We’re having a conversation about what it means to be a man in the 21st century. It’s the conversation no one else is having. And we’re hoping you’ll join.

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We’re looking for people want to talk about men, and want to better understand the rapidly changing roles that are happening in the 21st century. If writing about the trials, the tribulations, and the joys of manhood appeals to you, we’d love for you to become a regular blogger. You will get a terrific platform (the total network is steadily growing, but right now gets almost 8 million pageviews a month) and an opportunity to help shape not only The Good Men Project itself, but the conversation about men in the world. There really is no limit to what you can blog about, as long as it relates in some way to things that men in today’s modern world care about (And trust us, that’s a whole lot of things). We are also looking for humor, insights, and raw honest truths. But mostly we’re looking for your own unique voice. First person narratives that lead to some deeper, universal understandings are always welcome here. Check out our about page if you want to learn more about who we are and how we’ve grown.

Virtually any well-written post about anything you can imagine that relates to men in the 21st century is something we’d consider publishing.

If you, or someone you know, is interested in becoming a blogger at The Good Men Project, please email Lisa Hickey at lisa@goodmenproject.com with a pitch. We’ll want to know who you are, what you want to write about, and how you expect to do it. Some sense of your writing (and life) experience would help too. You will need to show that you have good ideas, the capacity for brutal honesty and, hopefully, a sense of humor. You will need a social media platform—be prepared to tell us your twitter following, facebook fans, g+ profile and any other places you have a social media footprint. (Redditors get brownie points). We are happy to help you grow your network—in fact, one of the benefits to working with our platform is that you can expect to double your network size if you combine our platform with your own efforts towards growth.

Answers to FAQs: a) unpaid b) 2 month minimum commitment c) write only when you have time, but we are looking for people who want to write at least four times a month—and up to 20 times a month—because they see the value to their own brand, name recognition and platform-building opportunities d) you will get editorial help, direction, and story ideas—as much or as little as you want and need e) you can always link back to your own blog or repost their after e) the majority of your posts will need to be unique content e) once you get into our system, you will upload and format your posts, however, we will have final editorial say f) yes, we work with many large media companies and have a large social network, and we will not only help push your work outward but teach you how to grow your own network. Regular writers also get first crack at interview opportunities, appearances on our own video panels, and the chance to do paid sponsored posts or move up to paid editorial positions.

Charles Bukowski was a mediocre poet and fiction writer. His work was brutally honest and it chronicled, sometimes in excruciating detail, the life he actually lived - painful, wounded, drunken, and more than a little outside the lines. The result body of work sells more books than Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey.

Open Culture marked his birthday last week with the best biography I have seen about his life.

There is nothing great or exceptional about Bukowski - other than his willingness to lay bare his life on the page. How many of us would be willing to be that raw, that open about our weaknesses and failures? How many of us can turn those dark places into something many people see as art?

Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

August 15th, 2012

Neglected to mark the occasion of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski‘s birthday yesterday? Then observe it today with a viewing of the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This. The most in-depth exploration of Bukowski’s life yet committed to film, the movie “is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems likely to last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukowski enthusiasts both expected and unexpected appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton, Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin, filmmaker Taylor Hackford (director of the earlier documentary titled simply Bukowski), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skillfully woven with the reminiscences of former drinking buddies, fellow writers and Bukowski’s second wife, Linda, the keeper of the flame, whom he married in 1985,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times. “Without straining, the film makes a strong case for Bukowski as a major American poet whose work was a slashing rebuke to polite academic formalism.”

Some might contrarily consider Bukowski’s writing glorified wallowing, a mere profane exultation of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omitting neither great embarrassment nor minor triumph. Holden mentions that Bukowski, “a pariah in high school, suffered from severe acne vulgaris, which covered his face with running sores that left his skin deeply pitted. He recalls standing miserably in the dark outside his senior prom, too humiliated to show himself,” and that for all his work dealing with late-life sexual prowess, “he was a virgin until he was 24, the same age at which his first story was published. His description of sexual initiation with an obese woman whom he wrongly accused of stealing his wallet is a spectacularly unpromising beginning to the prolific sexual activity (described in his novel “Women”) that flowered after fame brought admirers.” Ebert asks the obvious question: “How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

You can find Born Into This listed in the Documentaries section of our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, or purchase your own copy on Amazon here.

Related content:

• Charles Bukowski: Depression and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Creative Juices (NSFW)
• The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukowski
• Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski
• Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukowski, “Laureate of American Lowlife”
• Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

From Men's Journal, an interview with one of my favorite writer/directors, Aaron Sorkin. He was writer and creator of The West Wing and Sports Night, writer of The American President (which is where the idea for The West Wing came from), and writer of The Social Network, among many other credits.

The Last Word: Aaron Sorkin

By Sean Woods  Aug 2012

The 'Newsroom' creator on writing, regret, and the one thing that lives up to the hype. 

Getty Images

What advice would you give to younger you?
 

To try to enjoy things a little more and not be so nervous about everything. I would give a lot of advice because I've made a lot of mistakes. Certainly I'd tell myself not to try drugs. Once you do that, you're going to change the trajectory of your life in a terrible way.

Don't drugs help the creative process, at least for a time?
 

Yeah. If we're going to have a really honest conversation about this, drugs haven't hurt my record collection any. My big fear when I quit drugs was that I wouldn't be able to write anymore. Because if you're a writer and you're on a roll – and I was on a roll when I was high – you don't want to change anything about the way you work. But I'm 11 years clean now, and I've been much more productive in those 11 years than I was in the 11 years prior. But even if I hadn't been, it wouldn't have been worth it.

What motivates you?
 

My biggest motivation is that I love writing. And I love putting on a show. Also, fear of failure is a huge motivation. About a year and a half ago, I won the Oscar, and I walked off stage and was taken through a labyrinth of press rooms, and I don't think five minutes had gone by before I thought to myself, "Oh, shit...I have to do this every time now, or it's a failure."

What's the best way to end a relationship?
 

I've had to end a few. I have a fantastic divorce. Julia, my ex-wife, and I split up when our daughter Roxy was only five months old, so her parents living apart is the only life she's ever known. We don't pass her back and forth, there's no schedule. We often do things as a family. We take vacations together, we go out to dinner together. We hang out together. I consider myself extremely lucky that I have this kind of divorce. So whatever we did is the way to do it.

How has being a dad changed you?
 

Being a father is the only thing that lives up to the hype. When I'm with my daughter – when we're doing homework together or hanging out watching a movie or kicking a soccer ball around or doing any of the things that we do – that's the only time that I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. When I'm with Roxy, it's a great relief to no longer be the most important thing in my life.

How does a man know when someone is bullshitting him?
 

Here's the problem: When someone's bullshitting you, they're usually telling you something you want to hear, so you don't want it to be bullshit, and so you haven't turned on your bullshit detector. Which is why, when you can find people who are honest with you, you should stay close to them.

What's the one thing every man should experience before he dies?

Well, love, for sure, and a steak at Peter Luger's.

How should a man grow old?

The trick is that it's pretty easy to get angry at youth because you're so envious of it. They've got so much more of their life left. They've got more energy than you do, the world is kind of calibrated toward them. Skip that. It's not going to do any good.

What do Americans not understand about Hollywood?

You know, it always kind of cracks me up when the Right feels that Hollywood is anti-America. No industry has come closer to creating the illusion of that America than Hollywood has. We're the ones who created the idea of pioneering the West with John Wayne. We're the ones who created the image of a nuclear American family where everybody's happy. We did all that. You have the image of America that you have because we invented it and put it on a screen.

How should a man handle regret?

Oh, gosh, regret is the worst. There's a lot of things in my life that I regret, but if I could find a way to draw a line from that thing to my daughter, and say, "If it hadn't been for that stupid thing, I never would've done this stupid thing, which led me to this good thing, which led me to Roxy." Then I feel great. Then I don't care.