Greetings!

So once upon a time, I had a little xanga blog. It wasn’t pretty (I recall doing deliberately horrifying things to the background and font colors, in fact) but I wrote on it pretty regularly for about five years, from the start of undergrad until I began my PhD. Then I spent the next five and a half years writing furiously in that entirely disembodied, impersonal genre—the academic paper—even as I was immersed in those most embodied realities of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding. I taught new writers how to remain true to their own voices in their academic writing, but found myself repeatedly attempting to imitate the voices of the scholars I was reading for my research.

I don’t want to get into a discussion about the serious problems inherent in academic writing (maybe another day), but I hope you see why, having finished the PhD a few weeks ago, I feel the need to start writing again in such a different genre than I have been for the past 5+ years. That’s reason #1 for this blog.

Reason #2 is more prosaic. We just moved for my husband’s job, putting us 3-4 hours away from most of our family. It’s not a terribly long distance, but moving babies three times as far away from their grandparents, great-grandparents, (great) aunts and uncles and cousins as they had been is hard, and facebook isn’t as satisfying. So I hope this will help us stay connected to each other across the distance and between visits.

Finally, I find myself newly PhDed, newly relocated, and newly unemployed. The word “unemployed” looks very dire, but the problem isn’t the lack of money but the lack of a firm daily rhythm, larger purpose outside the household, and connection with other people. So reason #3 is that this will be a place where I can write through my efforts to figure out what the heck I’m going to do with myself now! I have a few ideas (including, obviously, applying for jobs to start in the fall!), but hopefully more possibilities will reveal themselves as I go.

I’ve seen lots of bloggers over the past few years talk about this One Word thing, where they pick a single word to be their motto or whatever for a new year. I tried that once for myself, and it worked ok, but this year I keep remembering what Sir Balin says near the beginning of the Morte Darthur when he takes the cursed sword that the damsel tries to take back from him. “I will take the aventure that God woll ordayne for me.” While it turns out quite badly for Balin himself, it also sets the stage for a much bigger and more wonderful story (the Grail Quest). So I hope this will be a year of embracing changes and welcoming adventures, most of which I will hopefully remember to write about!