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Amber Michelle, Writer, Editor & Content Consultant

At Rapaport Diamond Report, where I was editor in chief, Lisa was responsible for copy editing and fact checking news briefs and articles for our print magazine and she also provided copy editing and fact checking for the news component of our website. In addition, she rewrote copy when necessary as part of the editing process as many of our reporters spoke English as a second language and rewrites were necessary for clarity.

Working on a magazine and website at the same time required Lisa to be organized and to be able to prioritize work according to deadlines. She is always upbeat, has good ideas and stays calm under pressure. As a media organization, it was essential that our copy was clearly written, grammatically correct and handed in on deadline. Lisa accomplished all three of these actions with very little direction and always gave me an end product that was perfected.

Lisa understands media and what people working in media need. She also has highly developed writing, editing and fact-checking skills.

She is self-directed and is able to work well on her own with little oversight; however, she also worked well with the rest of the team and was an integral part of our production process. She always did a very thorough job and has a great ability to follow through on anything that she is working on.

Lisa is an intelligent, motivated, detail-oriented person who I could count on to get the job done correctly and in a timely manner. I enjoyed working with Lisa and she made my job much easier by always doing her job really well.

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Dr. Deidre Hill Butler

Associate Professor of Sociology & Director of the Africana Studies Program, Union College

I have known Lisa Haviland as an editor and “writing coach” since 2007, when I hired her as my academic editor, after her references just glowed about her. Lisa is punctual and accurate. She provides concise encouragement and advice on the technical and conceptual parts of academic writing.

The articles I completed and revised with the aid of her editorial guidance, often through multiple drafts that she edited on multiple levels, further solidified my career.  With her editorial expertise, I was able to create a solid tenure promotion file. Thanks to her assistance, I became the first Black woman tenured at Union College in the social sciences in January 2009.

Lisa provides extremely clear comments that have helped me sharpen my work, including during my guest editorship of a special edition on Africana Mothering for Africology: the Journal of Pan African Studies (JPAS). Her diplomatic yet direct feedback to participating writers helped focus the issue as a body of work, as well as streamlining and improving individual submissions.

The writing I worked on with Lisa as my editor went on to be published in Afro-Americans in New York Life and History: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Journal of the Association for the Research on Mothering. Her scrupulous attention to detail and feedback on concept construction was extremely valuable. She even reviewed and copy edited my course syllabi, which enhanced my teaching goals. Lisa is an energetic, detailed editor. There is no one better.

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Samuel Richard

Editor & Writer

Ask me for a smart and thoughtful editor, and I’ll give you Lisa Haviland. I had the opportunity to work with Lisa as a contract copy editor for Capital Group in downtown Los Angeles. The fact that she has worked in the Marketing Communications department of one of the world’s largest global investment managers speaks to her caliber and solid skill set. 

Lisa was a joy to work with. But even more, she proved to be a valuable contributor to the company. For instance, Lisa created an Editor’s Guide for a particular set of quarterly emails developed by Capital. Her document provided guidance on various aspects of the emails, a key piece of communication used by the company. Capital will continue to reap the benefits of Lisa’s work.

Lisa also proved herself to be someone who can handle large projects and manage her time well. She regularly handled complex projects and has helped me out when I needed a colleague to help bear my workload. Lisa is a team player.

Work with Lisa, and you will have a driven employee who meets deadlines and takes her work seriously.

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Untitled

Must be lazy, unstructured

to work this way

I cannot summon the energy

to be who I was

yesterday.

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The Gonzo Tapes

The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Popshifter

“For me, it was the first time I’d ever even heard an artillery shell fired and when they come in and hit, it’s a, ah, unnerving experience. . . When you’re out in a jeep that continually backfires and boils over and stops by the side of the road in the midst of voluntary convoys and hoards of refugees, yeah, you tend to think that maybe the world is about to come to an end.”

That’s Hunter S. Thompson reporting on the state of Saigon, Vietnam, circa 1975. He traveled there at the urging of New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson, as documented on The Gonzo Tapes. Emerson’s idea was for Thompson to expand on the paradigm of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first published as a two-part Rolling Stone series in 1971, by writing about Saigon’s last days at the close of the Vietnam War. As the tapes reveal, however, Thompson’s method was more akin to participatory journalism—with some severe twists—than anything that could really be planned ahead of time. After all, he originally traveled to Las Vegas in 1971 to write photo captions on the Mint 400 for Sports Illustrated.

The Gonzo Tapes capture the spirit of Thompson’s journalism, which, despite the colossal impact of the frenzied Fear and Loathing, hinged more on the purity of experience than the excesses of one infamous trip. As Thompson remarked on tape to Jann Wenner, founder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, prior to the novel’s release, “I couldn’t get a hotel room if that thing came out right now.” The image of Hunter S. Thompson as the chaos-inducing, semi-deranged version of himself portrayed by Johnny Depp, a.k.a. Raoul Duke, may be the one that endures, but that version only captures one aspect of the man.

Thompson’s reflections on Vietnam, which were not published until ten years after the fact, adhere to his predominant style of alternately reporting on and reacting to events, rather than creating them, as he arguably did in Vegas—and even then, one might say he was becoming his environment, a rider in the storm with a megaphone. He wasn’t out there just partying, though obliteration in the face of absurdity was certainly an aspect of his trip, yet many seem to cling to and celebrate the boozing and drugging at the expense of his body of work as a whole. After listening to these tapes, Bill Murray’s depiction of Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam struck me as an even more accurate rendering of the intelligent, droll, weird, erratic, and strangely calm-sounding journalist, whose earlier subjects, such as the Hell’s Angels and Richard M. Nixon, were much less lucid.

The opening track finds Thompson crouched in his car at the outskirts of an Angels event in Bass Lake, California, partly to be audible on tape amid their screams and whoops and partly because “the sight of this thing would drive them to madness—they’d burn the machine.” He was able to infiltrate the group while researching Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, though he held few illusions about the potential danger of the association. The precarious nature of his position—an outsider documenting a notorious group in an open capacity, rather than an undercover one—and the alternate disconnect and overlap between the American public’s perceptions of the Angel’s crimes and their actual crimes transcended the standard boundaries of popular journalism. As Thompson explains:

“The situation doesn’t fit them: they’re either more guilty than they really are by the law or they’re less guilty. It’s obvious now that this is a very peculiar situation for the town of Bass Lake—the resort area of Bass Lake—to handle. And yet the Angels are so far not guilty of anything; they’re a bunch of good, fun-loving American lads out riding their motorcycles around the state and having a good time, out here for a Fourth of July camping trip. But there’s so much more to it that the law simply does not cover.”

That sort of gray area is where Thompson thrived as a writer, his eventual beating by a group of Angels notwithstanding, and dwelling there required him to take risks that many were not willing to take or, in post-9/11 America, are not allowed to take. Most of the recordings are culled from the 1970s, Thompson’s most prolific period, and some of the practices he railed against, such as disingenuous flaks and poor event organization, have become accepted norms today. As he remarked during the 2004 presidential campaign, “Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush.” While Thompson notes on tape that he did not take what he perceived to be unnecessary risks, he also makes it plain that he was aware that many deemed the risks he did undertake too dangerous, but that he did not take them to be reckless. In deciding to re-enter Saigon when so many correspondents had fled, the good doctor mused:

“If the worst happens, well, it just happens. I’ve been pushing it for a while—about ten years now, 15, 20. I’m not looking for the end, but I’m not worried about it, either. I had a good time and made a few points. And I don’t know if that justifies doing kill-crazy things, or suicidal things, but if I really thought it was suicidal, I wouldn’t go back in. But the fact is that it’s not safe. There are a lot of people who know the situation better than I do who would call it suicidal. And they all left and they admitted they just didn’t want any part of a suicide orgy. I don’t think many of the people over there do, although I’d say there’s easy ten to 20 percent who would welcome it for reasons of their own. I don’t know those reasons; I like my life, I enjoy it, but I’ve come this far and it’s my story and. . . I think I’ll just run with this one, which means going right back into the eye of the storm. And it will be a storm. We don’t have much doubt about that.”

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2015 Healthcare Symposium

The Future of Healthcare: Five Clips

1. Critical Issues in the Future of Healthcare from Keynote Speaker Susan Dentzer, Senior Policy Advisor, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Regardless of varying opinions on the merits of the law, as well as its shortcomings, the ACA’s impact, as Dentzer illustrated, has been tremendous: 12 million people signed up in the most recent open enrollment period, with 50 percent more signing up this year than the year before; 3.4 million young people were able to stay on their parents’ policies up to the age of 26; 11 million people were added due to Medicaid expansion, some of whom had never had health insurance; and Latinos, a group with a baseline uninsurance rate of 42 percent, had seen that rate knocked down by 12.3 percentage points by the first quarter of 2015.

2. The Healthcare Supply Chain: An Inside Look from Keynote Speaker Steve Collis, President and CEO, AmerisourceBergen Corporation

Pharmaceutical care comprises about 15 percent of the 17 percent share of GDP devoted to health care, with Collis describing the industry as “highly, highly consolidated.” AmerisourceBergen’s specialty group holds a 55 percent market share in oncology and community oncology, has about 6,000 employees, a 4,000-pharmacy network for its independent pharmacies, and ships to 70,000 customers every day, ranging from Kaiser to Walgreen’s to a good neighbor pharmacy that might have a single store, delivering a staggering 4.5 to 5 million prescriptions a day. As Collis put it, “We have enormous impact on the pharmaceutical supply chain.”

3. The Changing Landscape: Implications for Cost Management, Physician Alignment, and Patient Care, Panel 1

“If you’re going to change behaviors, you have to do it in a simple way that engages people and you have to give them things which they can do in their life. If you want to live longer, miss fewer days of work, have less healthcare costs, or control your diabetes if you have it, walk 30 minutes five days a week because within six or eight weeks, if you walk 30 minutes five days a week, you will meaningfully improve your health and you will significantly extend your longevity.”

4. The Next Frontier: Innovations in Disease-State and Care Management Delivery, Panel 2

The public hunger for more accessible, direct care has manifested not only in the continuing popularity of community pharmacies, but through the increasing use of wearables, or portable devices a user can wear to monitor his or her heart rate and other vital stats to gauge his or her health, without going into the doctor’s office for a traditional checkup.

As Aguwunobi commented during the panel discussion, “You now have the ability to have early warning systems come out of these wearables that allow you to intervene and take action. And I do think that in a world like that, the health system has to be a lot more responsive to the interaction with individuals—with the patient, with the customer. When you call, you expect to have somebody on the other side.”

5. Moving Forward: The Drive Toward Clinical Innovation, Panel 3

“I was asked at an investors’ conference if they had $300 million to invest in healthcare, where should they do it?” Barber recalled during the panel discussion on the shape of the industry going forward. “And I said: Costco. Anybody who has diapers next to Depends understands the continuum of care.”

“But I do think that you don’t hire a chef to fry a couple of eggs; I think that the healthcare industry is going to be fragmented and the high-acuity, high-complexity work will be done by physicians and hospitals. And regarding the third of care, at least, that is low-complexity and ready-access, the pharma industry—CVS, Costco—is going to pick our pocket based on lower price, higher accessibility, more comfort.”

“We are an industry that has done a very good job at being scientifically brilliant and self-serving and providing poor access and there are people who make a living out of providing good access and they’re going to pick the low-acuity work and take it away from us and we’re going to be in the severe high-acuity business, not in healthcare, unless we incorporate that into our solution,” Barber concluded.

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Don’t Stop The Music

A Look at How Two Murders Moved a Community

Antigravity Magazine

After Dinerral Shavers’ death, the old band room, number 314, at Rabouin High School served as a shrine of sorts for the students’ band leader, teacher and friend; his desk was taped off because they didn’t want any other teacher sitting there for a while, explains Rabouin’s social worker, Glenis Scott.

As we walk down hallways and up stairs, we pass poster after poster commemorating Dinerral, though many have been taken down now that a month has passed. Dinerral began his one-semester tenure at Rabouin as a substitute French teacher in late September, became a daily sub and, as a young man of twenty-five, stirred interest and enthusiasm among his students as well as his coworkers. Dinerral had been featured in the December issue of the school’s newsletter, The ‘R’ Report, with students later cutting out the article and taping it to their shirts to symbolize their support and respect for the man who, in addition to being the Hot 8 Brass Band’s snare drummer since its 1996 formation, was the man to bring music to the Rabouin campus.

“When he first started working, he said that he was a member of the Hot 8 and was I interested in starting a band,” says Kevin George, the school’s principal. “Rabouin never had a band program—we didn’t have the facilities, the instruments. He would ask two and three times a week and I would rebuff him. Eventually, he started coming to me with a plan. I told him to put it on paper and he brought me something the next day.”

Aided by instrument donations from the Tipitina’s Foundation and filmmaker Spike Lee, Dinerral assembled eighty-five students spread across four grades and had them begin practicing, sans instruments, before school, after school and during their lunch periods, with the group’s first assignment being to learn how to read music.Flags and majorettes joined the fledgling musicians and enthusiasm for the endeavor grew as the semester proceeded. The instruments were due in after the holiday break and arrived as expected, though the celebration paled in the wake of gunfire one Thursday afternoon on St. Philip Street.

"The first thing I saw when I came back to school was band uniforms and equipment," remembers George, "and it hit me that he was gone."

Just as Dinerral made music more accessible to his students, filmmaker, animator and co-founder of the New Orleans Film Collective, Helen Hill, strived to extend the art of filmmaking to the community at large by holding filmmaking bees at the Mid-City home she shared with her husband, Dr. Paul Gailiunas, who headed The Troublemakers, as well as a solo act, Ukulele and the Machine. 

"Her guests would have tea and work on each other’s – literal - film strips and talk," explains Rene Broussard, founder and curator of the Zeitgeist Theater. "It was filmmaking as a social activity." 

Broussard cites his 2004 nomination of Helen for the Rockefeller Media Fellowship, which she received for her film-in-progress, The Florestine Collection, as his proudest curatorial achievement. This unfinished work was inspired by Helen’s discovery of clothing patterns made by a blind, 90-year-old African American woman and discarded in the street after her death, with the film centering on her sense of connection to this woman via the dresses.  

Helen is perhaps best known for Mouseholes, a tribute to her "Pop," who died when she was a young girl, and for films like Scratch and Crow, The World’s Smallest Fair and Madame Winger Makes a Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century in which she laments that she is unable to achieve her goal of making a vegan film because all film stock utilizes animal products. 

"Her films are brilliantly simple," says Jeremy Campbell, documentary filmmaker and founder of New Orleans’ Flicker Film Festival. "They achieve what so many filmmakers are afraid to attempt: to speak to the audience, not at them." 

"She was like a pied piper in a way; she just brought with her a breath of fresh air," Broussard says. "This is an artistic community with a lot of eccentric people – yet, everyone would meet her and Paul and say, ‘Are they for real?’" 

Wendy Treat, keyboardist and backing vocalist for the Troublemakers and front woman for Treatus, the precursor to Glorybee, echoes this sentiment. 

"The first time I met Helen was at this Dafa Fungus jam comic book meeting. She and Dr. Paul were so enthusiastic, so excited and so happy about everything. I thought that they were the fakest people I had ever met," Treat remembers. "It turned out that they were actually like that. When my mom met Helen for the first time, we were at a party or an art gathering or something like that, and Helen showed her around and over to the refreshments. My mom helped herself to a big helping of tofu ice cream and it was the grossest stuff she'd ever tasted. We laugh about that still."  

On January 18, the new band room at Rabouin, number 102, is abuzz, a cacophony of horns, drums and shouts that later streamline under the watchful eye of a Nightline camera. 

"For a beginning band, we’re doing pretty good," the new band director, Darryl Person, tells me. "This is a band director’s dream; we’re playing with brand new horns and drums." 

The band’s song list is comprised of I Want to Know, Neck!, Stuntin' like my Daddy, Can You Feel It?, Stay, Morris Brown and Missing You, which is Darryl’s favorite because it is specifically dedicated to Dinerral. 

The Hot 8 have performed at Rabouin twice since December 28, first at the January 9 basketball pep rally and then for the January 12 "Day of Memories" ceremony honoring Dinerral. The Truth Brass Band also played and choir director Damon Williams sang, with students Jamika Barnes, Quincy Bridges and Thea Daniels reading original poems written for the occasion. 

"He was like a brother to me," says Harry "Swamp Thing" Jones, bass drummer for the Hot 8. "That was my right hand man on the back row, on the drums."

When asked how she would like Dinerral to be remembered, majorette choreographer Jamika Saul instinctively replies, "As a man who loved children and one who had the children’s best interests at heart." 

There is sadness, there is disbelief, too, encircling those interviewed, those called upon to highlight life over death. 

"He worked so hard for this. He had this vision and he wasn’t able to see it through," says Kevin George. 

"It’s just impossible to imagine her being the victim of violence," says Rene Broussard, who, like the Hot 8 and Rabouin, will honor his friend and colleague, specifically with a Zeitgeist tea party featuring Helen’s trademark peppermint tea and cotton candy on Sunday, February 4, at 3:30.

In "Get Up," a song Dinerral penned for the Hot 8’s latest CD, "Rock with the Hot 8," one of the victim’s lyrical laments lives in the refrain, "My people, keep the peace, keep the murder rate down." 

When I come home from a long walk one day, having left my stereo on and The Troublemakers in rotation, I enter my apartment to Dr. Paul singing, "You’ll never be alone, you’ll never be alone, you’ll never be alone" and can’t help but wonder. 

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Karolyn Schuster, Senior Business Editor

Rapaport Diamond Report

Having worked alongside Lisa Haviland for seven years at a fast-paced monthly B-to-B magazine, I enthusiastically recommend her as an editor with extraordinary skills, extensive experience and impeccable professional standards. She is equally adept at fact-checking, editing and proofreading breaking news, trend analyses and academic research covering the consumer, business, economic, government, education, and political sectors.

At the magazine, where she worked with U.S.- and foreign-based writers who possessed a wide range of writing and language proficiencies, she took the initiative in personally compiling a universal style guide that promoted clarity and consistency in all editorial copy, both website-based and print. She is exacting and resourceful in fact-checking and focused and efficient in finalizing complicated copy for publication on tight deadlines.

In my 40-year career in publications, I have never worked with an editor who possesses more impressive abilities or performs at a higher professional level. As an editor, she is a rare talent and a gift to writers.

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Nancy Dodd, Editor-In-Chief, Graziadio Business Review

Author of The Writer’s Compass: From Story Map to Finished Draft in 7 Stages 

I have known Lisa for 15 years, first as a student in the Master’s of Professional Writing program and then as a freelance writer and editor. When I served as editor of Marshall Magazine at USC, I hired Lisa as a writer and she submitted articles and interviews that were interesting, engaging, and well-written. She also garnered positive remarks about the articles from highly placed alums such as William McMorrow, Thomas Barrack, Jr., and Robert Best.

In fact, her work was so good that when the Dean of the Marshall School at the time, Dean Westerfield, asked me for a recommendation for a proofreader for his highly acclaimed textbook, she was the first person I thought of and recommended. From that success, she was recommended for other important proofreading assignments.

When I left the Marshall School to serve on the faculty of Pepperdine’s Graziadio School as academic editor of a peer-reviewed journal, I continued to hire Lisa’s services as an editor to edit faculty articles and academic papers.

Lisa is efficient, creative, meets deadlines, and always gives her best work. I highly recommend her for any writing or editing position. I know that whatever she is assigned, she will put her best efforts forward and that the work will be thorough and well-thought out.

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Noose

Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that? - Barbara Bush on ABC-TV, March 20, 2003

The mind an accessory not beautiful but brilliant when worn by a woman. But why bother? balks our Babs. Go for the slow kill, the death of feminine dissent, disarray a pearl necklace tied tight.

This poem also appears at Occupy Poetry.       

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Ember

Back from the fire

I sit and slip

into idle imagination

losing any concentration

to my pursuit

of your ambivalent perfection.

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Now Normal

It is now normal, the way that sea level has been shaken upside down, a perfect way for have-nots to drown. now normal, the way the deranged order you to pull yourself up while they whip you with those proverbial bootstraps. now normal, to out an operative, and, two tired years later, when you are finally indicted, to be referred to as noble by the news. now normal, to prosecute blow jobs, but not treason, this age of absent reason. now normal, to look back on Nixon with something bordering on nostalgia – but not quite. now normal, to pretend poor people are better off in a dome than a home, though it is sort of scary – for you, not them. now normal, to rebuild a Catholic church by adding a fountain and some marble flooring, forgetting the pedophiles you’re supposedly abhorring. It is now normal. They don’t even need to make this stuff up anymore – unless they want to wage official war.

Copyright ©: Lisa Haviland

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Portfolio

Businesses & Publishers I’ve Worked With Include:

Barron’s

Capital Group

City of Hope

Empire City Men’s Chorus

Pepperdine University, Graziadio School of Business and Management

Playboy

PQ Media

Rapaport Diamond Report

Simulations Plus

Union College

University of Southern California

World Screen

Editing Clips

Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business Review: 

Six Characteristics of Virtuous Organizations

Taking Management to a Whole New Level: The Era of the Play-By-Play Man!

The Commercial Global Drone Market: Emerging Opportunities for Social and Environmental Uses of UAVs

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Editing:

The through-line of my life, a consistent and interesting line of work that has kept me grounded, paid the bills, and given me a focus day to day and through all upheavals: past, present, and future.