Please allow me to introduce myself....

Wealth? Hardly. Taste? Well, perhaps. Certainly a healthy (albeit skeptical) curiosity and a sense of humor, I hope.

I'm Marty Hale-Evans, a writer, editor, artist who doesn't art as much as she'd like, and graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Washington School of Information. (The iSchool is my school!) I'm the co-author of Mindhacker and a contributing author/editor of Mind Performance Hacks. I'm a voracious reader, unrepentant thinker, and compulsive discusser. I've been online since about 1985, and have been very involved with social media since before there was a term for it; this may be what I end up doing when I finish my MLIS, but I haven't quite decided yet. In other news, I love dogs (and have two of them), tabletop games, comedy, culinary experimentation, mid-century design, color theory, pop music (usually vintage), good coffee, information for its own sake (there's no such thing as trivia), and words used well.

In this space, I expect to be talking about some of the same ground as we touched in the books: thinking, communication, technology, creativity, media. However, this is my "book," so I expect my own opinions will be more to the fore, and I reserve the right to explore tangents.

And what about those fish, you may ask? Well...it came to my attention some years ago that Fish Who Answer the Telephone was the title of an old book, and although I've never read it, it became something like a koan for me to imagine it. What were these fish like? How on earth did they do it? Who set out to put them in such a position, and why? Why would someone want to call them, and what would motivate them to answer? For that matter, how would they answer, and in what language? It's provided me with no end of imagination fodder, and now it seems like a good metaphor for we who approach technology and communication channels that seem ever newer and more alien, with motivations and expressions that may seem idiosyncratic and hard for anyone else to understand, yet with the intention to make that strange connection to the world. Somehow the image has ended up more powerful than the sum of its parts, and I hope my explorations here will prove the same, and as curiously delightful to whomever may be looking in.