260 Days of Writing

I wear a lot of hats.  I am a mama. I am a scholar. Sure. But I am also a wife, teacher, sister, friend, daughter, administrator, small business owner, a person who mends fences, a person who wants to be an advocate, a person who brings other people together, a person trying to find health and stay healthy. Somewhere in all of that, I am also a woman who wakes up every day with 24 hours to be alive. Lately, I have been feeling a lot like I don't cherish those 24 hours enough--appreciating them gets lost in all the hat changing. But I find that I make sense of the different moments and different roles with words. I look for stories, write them in my mind, compose narrative to the day.

In the book, and I think the film, Julie and Julia, the protagonist Julie talks about setting out to cook her way through Julia Child's classic cookbook, as a need to be a part of something more fulfilling. For me, I find I am at a point in my life where I need something to channel all the fulfillment around me.  So I am setting up this challenge for myself: 260 days of writing.  I will write something every weekday for the year of 2014. The writing may be of any genre, length, or style.  It may be good, but I am sure it will often be very very bad.

The topics will likely be things near and dear to my heart, education, diversity, motherhood, politics, academia, cooking, the art of trying to see how skinny people live.  If anyone ever reads this blog and gives me a prompt or a genre, I will write on demand, or at least do my best to do so.  Besides simply posting some piece of writing every day, the only other rule is that the piece must convey meaning. And that in fact is what I think I am trying to do, find a way to make the meaning all around me explicit--to bring forth and give words to the hours, the minutes--the moments--that my jumbled life brings. So it is a personal journey, for sure.  But if anyone would like to join me, that would be groovy too.

Stay tuned...