From time to time life invites us to integrate our learning and experience to take a big step into something different. Now is such a time! I’m excited to share this new chapter!
Susan A. Marshall
Welcome! I’m glad you stopped by today. As we all know—sometimes painfully—life continues to challenge us to adapt, grow and move beyond where we’ve been. In response, this website has been updated and expanded to include our new Compassion Chats podcast as well as an eclectic blog meant to entertain and perhaps inspire you to accept and positively respond to the challenges you face. I invite you to engage, ponder and reach out with a request, challenge or additional thought. If you would like to be a guest on our Compassion Chats podcast, please complete the form below.
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Backbone Banter Blog
Welcome! This blog is the product of many years of working with three elements of backbone: competence, confidence, and risk taking, as well as a writer’s compulsion to express. It is a weekly real-time collection of observations, musings, and an occasional rant. There’s no agenda, other than to comment on the world as it appears behind my eyeballs, hoping it
Predictive AI and Mediocrity
I’ve watched the advance of AI technologies with a mix of admiration, skepticism, hope, and frustration. As a writer, I battled spell- and grammar-check. After years of writing bad prose, studying the craft, immersing myself in classics of the trade, including Strunk & White (The Elements of Style), Harry Shaw (Punctuate it Right) and William Safire (Fumble Rules), I learned

Predictive AI and Mediocrity
I’ve watched the advance of AI technologies with a mix of admiration, skepticism, hope, and frustration. As a writer, I battled spell- and grammar-check. After years of writing bad prose, studying the craft, immersing myself in classics of the trade, including Strunk & White (The Elements of Style), Harry Shaw (Punctuate it Right) and William Safire (Fumble Rules), I learned

The Danger of “Safe Space”
It sounds caring. Supportive. Kind. In my estimation it is insidiously the opposite. Needing a safe space suggests that we cannot handle life as it comes. That the evils of reality are simply too much. That there are people so perverse, so egotistically myopic, and so callous to the suffering of others that we need shelter from them. Undoubtedly, on

Etch-A-Sketch Principles
Once upon a toy time, there was Etch-A-Sketch, a creative toy sold for $2.99 in 1960. It was a Christmas favorite for several years. (You can find it today on Amazon for $23.99, “no charging, batteries, or Wi-Fi needed.”) An Etch-A-Sketch allows one to draw images by manipulating knobs – one on the left for horizontal lines; one on the
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