
BY TRACY HOFFMAN
President of the Washington Irving Society
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Since this is the first Wednesday in October, the busiest month for Irving on social media, I decided it was time to post on a Washington Irving Wednesday.
Because “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” lends itself to Halloween and because Columbus Day falls on October 11, and Irving wrote a biography about him, more people comment about Washington Irving during this time than in April, his birthday month.
We’re posting #31daysofwashingtonirving on Twitter. If you haven’t checked Twitter lately, be sure to give the daily quote a like, retweet, and/or comment. I’ve been experimenting with Canva, so I’m trying to make tiny improvements on Twitter. We have a simple, black and orange, moving image to announce the October theme.
I would like #31daysofwashingtonirving to be a constructive tool for dealing with any negativity about Washington Irving with regard to his writing of Columbus. By posting quotes from his tremendous collection of writing, we can give a more balanced approach to how Washington Irving is viewed and how he viewed the world. He wrote about the mistreatment of Native-Americans and the abuses of Columbus, while simultaneously viewing Columbus as a bridge between the Old World and the New.
Even though we’re moving along on Twitter, Instagram is another story. This past week, I started a Washington Irving Society account on Instagram, yet I don’t find many author societies in that space. Of course, scholars tend to be wordy, as opposed to picture-oriented, so we may need to give links to other really good Instagram feeds, such as those posting pictures from Sleepy Hollow, instead of trying to do something ourselves.
If you’re an Instagram guru and interested in helping out the Washington Irving Society, let me know. We may give you the reigns of the account, or advertise an account you’re already running. John Anderson has been monitoring and posting in Facebook for quite some time, but I’m still working the Twitter account, and dabbling with Instagram.
If you didn’t catch my last blog post, we have 501C3 status. After consulting with treasurer Kirsten Stine, I have decided to wait until 2022 to open a checking account and begin accepting dues for membership. If we started moving before January, I would front $1500 or so to open a checking account, and then I wouldn’t want to claim the write-off on my taxes because it would then create more red tape for the WIS.
Instead, we’re planning to begin accepting memberships via check in January, use those checks to open a checking account, and hopefully, we won’t need a big chunk of money from one person to get on track financially. A $10 annual membership would help us keep the website moving and build funds for future conferences. Once we have a checking account set up, we could then, of course, take electronic membership dues.
If you work with another author society and have useful advice on how to best set up finances, please reach out! I’m open to advice for best practices.
Finally, we’re gearing up for the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in Chicago. The CFP should go out soon. We already have one round table on American Hauntings, left over from ALA 2020, but after I consult with our vice-president Sean Keck, who oversees conference panels at ALA, we’ll get the CFP posted here on the website and in our social media outlets.
I’ll try to get back to blogging at the conclusion of our #31daysofwashingtonirving to let you know how it went. Perhaps if all goes well, we can do #25daysofwashingtonirving to celebrate his Christmas stories in December.
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Feel free to add to the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, or on this page. Comments are very much welcomed.