By

Mary
    In last month’s pontification, I declared that writers do writerly things — join, learn, explore, write, share. And then, of course, the dreaded “submit.”I’m not sure which is more frightening, not knowing how and where to submit, or getting back the dreaded rejection. Lawyers don’t win all their cases, and yet they keep...
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    July 26 AMICUS SCRIPTOR column: In the past few months, I’ve done some bookstore readings for my new novel, Warming Up, and at a couple of them, there have been people there I didn’t know!  Not friends.  Not friends of friends.  Not fellow alumni.  Generic members of the public. Why?  Why were they...
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"A year before Helman looked back on his career, Mary Hutchings Reed, a former partner now of counsel at the similarly elite Winston & Strawn, also looked back on a career that started 20 years after Helman's, and came to similar conclusions: Harder still for a lawyer billing by the hour to suggest that she do only the most important things, or the most cost-effective things. So now we're more efficient, but we do more and bill more, and balance less. We've become adept at the metrics for measuring our productivity, but we frequently mistake our billings for our value and self-worth. We don't know how to quantify professional values, such as thoughtful analysis, creativity, learnedness, and commitment. Are we, as a profession, "better" lawyers now than then? I don't know. I do sense that we spend too much time lawyering, at the expense of our personal lives. Large-firm practice is today technologically more efficient, facially more diverse, institutionally more conscious of women and minorities, formally supportive of pro bono, and structurally more suited to alternative work arrangements. However, largely because of technology, today's firms are also more time-consuming, more demanding, more money-conscious, less intellectual, and less human. It's an evolution paralleled by that of investment banking, which Mary Ho found in her excellent book Liquidated. What was once a stable entry into the respectable upper-middle-class—"a profession, not a lifestyle," as Reed describes it—evolved very quickly into a hypercompetitive world of brutal hours that made people very wealthy, but destabilized employees and eventually the firms that employed them. What's left looks a lot like the economy as a whole: layoffs, contract workers, and an industry in search of the stability it once had." Read the whole article:  http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2013/How-Big-Law-Wrecked-Itself/      
Thanks to the women of Freebon & Peters for a wonderful discussion of Leaning In and Courting Kathleen Hannigan.  My contemporary Eileen Trost wrote: “Thank you for your thoughts and insights, and your unique contribution to the advancement of women by memorializing where we have come from, and keeping us mindful that we have a...
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Carving a story from blank marble June 28, 2013 By Mary Hutchings Reed In my new novel, ʺWarming Upʺ (SheWritesPress, 2013), amateur sculptor Dr. Haverill Richardson, therapist to the main character, is unable to take the first swing at a hunk of marble because he doesnʹt know what itʹs going to be when he is...
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                                                                  Read it out  loud. Read it backwards. Take out every word ending in “-ly.” Review every use of “was.” Spell check. And though it  may be politically incorrect, every editor says it: “You’ve got to kill   your babies.” In other   words, edit your work. Writing 500   words a day for the past year, you...
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We were ranked “Band One” by Chambers USA in Illinois (and thanks to whoever said such nice things about me!  Also pleased to be in the same “rank” as our friends at Leavens, Strand & Glover.  If you click on the picture below you should be able to read it. ).
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A friend of a friend just wrote to me: “I just finished “Warming Up,” and wanted you to know how much I enjoyed it.  If I could write a novel like that, I think I would really feel like I made a contribution to our society.  It has so many terrific elements and themes.  But,...
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      I’ll be reading from Warming Up on May 28 at 7 pm at Boswell Book Company, 2559 Downer Ave, Milwaukee, WI.  Thanks to my publicist, Mary Bisbee-Beek, for setting this up, and thanks to Meg Ciccantelli, Maggie Daun and Roswitha Both for helping me spread the word up north.
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Thanks to Women & Children First for a wonderful evening reading at their store May 9.  Thanks to everyone who attended, also!  Owner Linda Bubon shared half the “pass the hat” Women’s Voices Fund collection with The Night Ministry.  She is always so generous to good causes as well as women and local authors.  
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