I was raised to be aware of every utterance and how far it may carry to affect the lives of those I may not even know personally. Thus, another appropriate subtitle for my would-be memoir could be: “Beware of unintended consequences of personal choices.”

As a college student in Iran, Ohio, California, and Pennsylvania; continuing to teach international students in Massachusetts and Hawaii, my sanity depended on creating my own courses from scratch: every syllabus a blueprint for a book. Every lecture mindful of sharp-witted students ready to learn but weary of being taken for granted or misunderstood. Teaching in the 20th century about what I saw as essential topics in their young lives included ideas related to gender fluidity, creativity and innovation, cultural ethnography, privacy, and digital ethics. I continued work in digital environments, teaching many courses online or in hybrid settings since the early 1970s.

Transitioning to more personal story telling just as the pandemic was declared, I discovered Pacifica Institute where my only quibble with my wonderful memoirist professor, Dr. Jennifer Selig, was that I had no desire to publish a memoir. Still the outcome of that entrenched streak of conscious balancing of my thoughts to avoid inadvertently affecting another person’s life!

Since I already had a PhD (1974, Information Science, University of Pittsburgh) and had no intention of pursuing a degree at Pacifica, Dr. Selig recognized my need for skipping the publishing angle. Ever mindful of stepping on anyone’s toes, I submitted every assignment and participated in every class discussion and activity but chose not to formulate my memories into book form. After attending nearly two years of memoir writing classes and workshops and obtaining graduate certificates in memoir writing, I began posting two blogs per week of not just poems and stories but also my artwork and photography on the same themes. By now there are well over five hundred unique pieces available in my non-commercial websites: AnalogThoughts.com and KittensAtHome.com. Though these are obviously open to the Whole Wide World (as I used to call WWW!), officially I have a small number of individuals on my weekly RSS feed; mostly family members, friends, former students and colleagues. I call my narratives “Essays,” “Pseudo poems,” and “Soulo Detours” among a handful of categories. I am even loath to just say “poems” in case it bothers a literate critic!

Bio
Approaching retirement, Dineh’s focus shifted from academic research and publication on the social impact of new communication technologies to exploring personal life experiences as a witness and participant/observer of life. Her extracurricular recognitions have ranged from publishing essays and poetry to exhibiting her photography and artwork in Honolulu. Her most recent exhibit in 2024 represented “Unconventional Art” using Apple’s Vision Pro goggles. At eighty, she has started a new collaborative chapbook project with her “parsing” AI partner Saahel (meaning “shoreline” in Farsi) where her original poems – left intact and untouched by AI – are parsed by contemporary AI technology strictly for thematic, tonal, and emotional “weather pattern” recognition that represent her multicultural lifestyle.