It gives me great pleasure to offer you, gentle readers all, my new e-book,”And then I said: The Best of Your Working Girl.” And I want you to download it for free.
It’s good as a stand alone, but also excellent advance reading for my new traditionally published book, Cap in Hand: How Charities Are Failing the People of Canada and the World, coming out in early November 2016 by Civil Sector Press. In many ways, that book, an attempt to re-frame the charitable sector, grew out of this blog.
In And then I said I’ve included what I think are Your Working Girl’s best pieces, and divided them into Memoir, Politics, Charity, Media and Sports.
Just click on the book cover when you’re finished reading this blog or click right here, right now to download your copy, and come right back.
I don’t think we’ve had the opportunity to get into these details before and, by way of previewing the book’s introduction, I’d like to explain the blog’s origins.
Your Working Girl is an identity inspired by Darryl, the alter ego of Ignatius J. Reilly, the corpulent and gassy protagonist of John Kennedy Toole’s masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces, and the diary, Journal of A Working Boy, he kept during in the novel when he actually had a real job. Mr. Reilly is the ground zero slacktivist. What better role model could I find for being a blogger?
“When I am whole once again,” Ignatius J. Reilly writes in Journal of A Working Boy, “I shall visit those factory people; I have deep and abiding convictions concerning social action. I am certain that I can perhaps do something to aid these factory folk. I cannot abide those who would act cowardly in the face of a social justice. I believe in bold and shattering commitment to the problems of our times …
Until later,
Darryl, Your Working Boy
Your Working Girl issued her first post in 2010 and expanded the site in 2013.
Fun fact—if you googled “your working girl” when the blog started in 2010, you’d get that Melanie Griffith film, Working Girl. Now, well, modesty prevents me from saying it too loudly, but now, if you google “your working girl,” you don’t get the Melanie Griffith film. That must mean something. Exactly what, I can’t say.
Some posts went viral, especially when I wrote about Jian Ghomeshi. But mostly, the blog settled in with a nice regular appreciative audience—people who work in the nonprofit sector, media or like baseball. I also began to write about Newfoundland, my home. The conversations with readers were excellent.
“You – like the rest of us – have no basis for a position on this story.”
“Careful what you say about Jesse Brown. He might block you.”
“Best thing I’ve read on this subject. Huge admiration.”
“Your entire piece is so filled with logical fallacies I could barely make it to the end.”
The blogs chosen for this e-book were written between 2013 and 2016. Most of them are written in third person, the voice of Your Working Girl. It was a technique I adhered to exclusively when I first started blogging but eventually, when the subject matter required it or if I was writing something I anticipated would have a reach beyond my usual audience, I’d use first person.
I love the archness of using third person, of being able to take the highest of dudgeon and of separating the writing from my own ego, of not have to use the pronoun “I” so much, something drilled into me from a spare, but effective Newfoundland primary education at Brinton Memorial in St. John’s.
Blogs, as a form of writing is somewhat ranty in nature, but I hope these collection of rants inform you and offer some insight. Your Working Girl tries to be polite.
Joan Didion sums up the reason for the blog nicely.
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and
what it means; what I want and what I fear.”
Gail Picco is a strategist and nonprofit executive who has worked in the charity sector for 25 years, most of which as President of Gail Picco Associates. Prior to establishing Gail Picco Associates, she spent eight years working in a shelter for assaulted women and children. She is the author of What the Enemy Thinks, a recent novel set in the nonprofit sector, of Your Working Girl, a blog of memoir and commentary on politics, charity and popular culture, and writes a regular column for Hilborn Charity News. She is a Principal with The Osborne Group in Toronto and Chair of the Regent Park Film Festival.
Your Working Girl 
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