The city of the violet crown

Where the phrase comes from

William Sydney Porter, O. Henry, lived in Austin in the 1880s and ’90s, working at the land office and then at a bank, writing on the side. He called the place the City of the Violet Crown, and the name stuck to it for a century after he left.

He didn’t invent it. Violet-crowned is a great deal older: it’s what the Greek poets called Athens, Pindar’s phrase, and Aristophanes had fun with it afterward. It describes a city ringed at dusk in a color you only get from particular hills at a particular hour.

That’s the part I like. It’s a borrowed compliment, applied with a completely straight face to a Texas river town that nobody was comparing to Athens, and it turned out to be right. Anyone who has watched the light go down behind the hills west of Austin knows exactly what he meant.

The long way around

Austin is my city and my school. It is not, however, a short walk from there to a Georgia office park, and I did not take the direct route.

After college I roamed. Washington State, then Oregon, then Alaska. I worked for a hotel. I worked for Pendleton Woolen Mills. I worked a fish cannery slime line, which is exactly what it sounds like and remains my leading candidate for the worst job ever held by anyone.

In Seward I lived in a cabin with no electricity and no running water and a resident porcupine, who had been there first and never once acted otherwise.

Then home to Texas. Then Louisiana. Then, finally, Georgia.

Johns Creek

Which is where I actually live and where the work gets done, northeast of Atlanta, past the point where the map stops feeling like a city and starts feeling like a lot of trees.

It is, in fairness, an odd place to run a firm named after Austin. Johns Creek is newer than the name it goes by; half the mapping services still want to file it under Alpharetta, which it is not. There is a small ongoing correction involved in living here, and I make it every time.

Some things came south with me. Chief among them a green chile habit that peaks every August and is not up for discussion.

Three jobs, one job

I’ve been a wedding photographer, a project manager, and a data analyst. That looks like three unrelated careers, and for a long stretch it mostly was. But the through-line turned out to be the same one every time: somebody has something they care about, and the systems around it are in the way.

It also explains why this practice does both halves. I have been the person who makes the thing look right, and I have been the person who makes the numbers come out, and I never did understand why those were supposed to be two different vendors with two different invoices who never speak to each other.

Why the name came along

I could have named this after myself, or after Atlanta, or after nothing in particular, some arrangement of Insight and Partners that would have told you nothing. I kept the Austin name because of what the phrase actually does.

Somebody looked at an ordinary place that no one was writing poetry about and gave it the good name anyway. That is fairly close to a description of this job. Small nonprofits do not get treated as serious organizations with serious data; they get the volunteer’s cousin, the free tier, the template with somebody else’s colors swapped out. The work I care about is the opposite of that: taking a small organization’s registration spreadsheet or donor list as seriously as anyone would take a large one’s, because the stakes are not smaller, only the budget is.

So the name is a promise about attention. It came from Austin by way of Alaska and Louisiana, and the practice is in Georgia, and all of that is true at once.

The star

The crown-star has been on everything since day one: the asymmetric five-point mark tucked above the C. Its top point is longer than the others, which is what lets it read as a star and a crown at the same time. It is the one piece of this identity that has never changed and never will.

It’s also, if you look at it in the right mood, a dusk-colored thing sitting on top of a name. Which was the idea.