Shooting for persistence
This bitter cold and snow-covered city is nothing if not an invitation to start anew.
So here I go, with a few new things.
I had a tiny, and I really do mean tiny (micro-flash fiction), piece published in the Hoot Review here.
My collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden, The Mindful Gardener, reprinted—and this time the publisher remembered to put my name on it!
The workbook I adapted/edited from the best-selling Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans is coming out this spring. You can pre-order it here.
Test Your Toddler's IQ is available now here. And, why stop there? Test Your Baby's IQ, too.
I've been keeping up with my writing/yoga blog project over at writingfitness.com, writing about winter twilight and running along the river and changing leaves.
Mainly I've been working on evaluations for minority education programs. One is for Jazz at Lincoln Center. They bring jazz concerts and related American history lesson plans to (mainly) Title 1 schools. Another is a teacher training and retention program for Thurgood Marshall College Fund. The goal is to get more African American teachers (particularly males) into underserved schools and support them in the early years of teaching. It's astounding what a dramatic impact African American teachers can make for African American students. That is further down the line than what we're currently studying. Our focus is on the training program. The hope is that the current work will translate to positive outcomes for students.
Oh, and one last thing, while I'm writing this update. I have a follow-up to Writer's Boot Camp:30-day crash course to total writing fitness. It is called—drumroll—Writer's Boot Camp 2. Now wait a minute. I can hear you shouting. Nooooo! You can't have a Writer's Boot Camp 2. It's a one-time thing. And I totally hear you because I had the same reaction. And it was a stumbling block at first, leading to a bunch of false starts. Finally I decided to just address the issue head-on in the introduction.
Anyway, I go on to talk about how I saw Wally lost his writing momentum, and eventually talk myself into a Writer's Boot Camp 2 as not only not illogical but really the most important part of the writing process.
Writer’s Boot Camp 2, I realized, wasn’t a lack of inspiration, and not just an extension of the first Boot Camp, but an essential companion, a roadmap for what to do when you’ve lost your mojo, for finding your way when it’s less obvious, less glamorous than the blood, sweat, and tears of the punishing, glorious first four weeks. It was also a way to think about balancing a dedication to writing with a need to continue on with the rest of your life.I suppose that's one of the questions that is always present here: How to balance a dedication to writing with the rest of my life. The answers are always conditional, they depend on the day, the rest of the family, Alex's changing job, school routines, my own work, the crazy two-year stint in grad school. On any given day, week, month, year, I haven't always found the answers I wanted, but I do always find that writing makes my experience of the rest of my life fuller. I have struggled with the shift away from blogs to the world of briefer status updates and primarily visual modes of communication. I long for the quiet of writing but also long for the energy and buoyancy and synergy of conversation and collaboration. I have at times felt extremely disappointed that the conversation I once had in this space has fallen away. But I'm shooting for staying the course. I would like to be able to say, (though I don't feel I remotely deserve the phrase that's been rightly applied to so many unbelievably tenacious women): Nevertheless, I persisted.
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